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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Inquilinus on 2024-03-14 19:20:57.

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What is Teppen?

Teppen is a popular variety TV show airing in Japan. At Teppen, celebrities from all fields compete in different skills outside of their main profession. The most famous Teppen competition is the piano contest, in which celebrities play a song of their choosing on piano and are scored out of 100 by a group of judges. This competition is hosted yearly to semi-yearly, usually with 5-10 celebrities competing. Many celebrities, inside and outside of the music field, have competed over the years, including a few AKB48 members. (Japanese Wikipedia page for Teppen.)

What is AKB48?

AKB48 is a large Japanese idol group founded in 2005 by producer Akimoto Yasushi. They dominated the Japanese music charts of the 2010s, having 37 of the top 50 selling songs of the decade, including #1-#16. AKB48 is based in Akihabara, and has sister groups throughout Japan, such as HKT48 in Hakata, Fukuoka. Between the main group and the sister groups, they have hundreds of members at any one time. One such member was Matsui Sakiko.

Who is Matsui Sakiko?

Matsui Sakiko (born 1990) joined AKB48 in 2009 as part of the 7th generation. She grew up playing piano, and became AKB’s resident piano girl, often playing during concerts. As a member, she attended and then graduated from Tokyo College of Music, specializing in piano. She was never a particularly popular member, having never been picked for the lineup (senbatsu) of an AKB48 single (though she did join the senbatsu one time due to the yearly rock-paper-scissors tournament, but that’s a story for another time.)

1st-9th Teppen

Sakiko joined the Teppen piano competition for the first time in 2012. This was Teppen’s 3rd piano competition, the first two having been won by Sayuri (born 1969), a comedian famous for her piano skills, who was considered the queen of the contest. Sakiko managed to score 86 points, which won her the competition. This caught the eye of Akimoto Yasushi, AKB48’s producer, who allowed Sakiko to release a solo album, mostly of piano renditions of AKB songs.

Sakiko and Sayuri would join the 5th Teppen* in 2013. This time, Sayuri retook her crown, with Sakiko receiving 2nd place. They would meet again at the 7th Teppen in 2014, this time reversing their fortunes: Sakiko the champion and Sayuri the runner-up. A rivalry quickly ensued, and Teppen created a special one-off competition just between Sakiko and Sayuri at the 9th Teppen later that same year. Sayuri was the victor.

*There was no piano competition at the 4th, 6th, and 8th Teppen.

However, another member had entered the fray: HKT48’s Moriyasu Madoka.

Who is Moriyasu Madoka?

Moriyasu Madoka (born 1997) joined HKT48 in 2011 with their 1st generation. She was immediately popular, and selected for the senbatsu for nearly every HKT48 single. She was also known for her piano skills. She had participated in piano competitions throughout her childhood, placing 9th in a nation-wide junior high school competition. However, as a popular member, she was extremely busy and wasn’t practicing piano consistently. She participated for the first time in the 7th Teppen and did very well, receiving 87 points. She hadn’t seriously played piano in two-and-a-half years at that point. After the competition, she announced that she would start practicing again and would be back.

The 10th Teppen

Six celebrities entered the 10th Teppen in early 2015. The last three scheduled to perform were Madoka, Sakiko, and Sayuri, in that order. The high score when it came to Madoka’s turn was 84. Madoka performed a rendition of Kubota Saki’s 70s hit “Ihojin”, impressing the crowd. One of the guests yelled out, “You’ve already won, haven’t you!” Madoka received 91 points, enough to take the top spot at the time. Next was Sakiko. She performed “Let it Go” from Frozen. To her surprise, she got 94 points, passing Madoka. She said that, listening to Madoka’s performance backstage, she was about to give up emotionally. Last was Sayuri. She performed “A Cruel Angel's Thesis”, the opening song for Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sayuri got 95 points, making her the champion once again.

Here are all three performances. Madoka’s performance starts at 1:25, Sakiko’s at 5:35, and Sayuri’s at 10:00.

(I am a total layman when it comes to piano, so I would appreciate insight from anyone more musically-inclined! I tried not to give my opinion or analysis earlier, but as a layman, I thought Madoka’s performance was clearly the most impressive.)

Aftermath

There was a huge amount of controversy after the episode aired. Many believed that Madoka easily should have won. There were accusations that the judges rigged it to further the Sakiko vs Sayuri storyline. The station received dozens of complaints questioning their scoring criteria. Music producer Fukada Yasuhiko objected to the scoring, saying that if Madoka got a 94, then Sakiko and Sayuri should’ve gotten an 83 and 80, respectively. He even suggested this result will have negative effects for children learning piano. The station responded that there was no evidence of rigging and stated "the performance is judged comprehensively based on the difficulty level of the arrangement, the expressiveness of the pieces, such as whether the pieces are played with passion, and the accuracy of the pieces, such as whether there are any mistakes." Source (Japanese).

Following Years

Teppen continued with their piano competition. Madoka, Sakiko, and Sayuri all entered in the 11th Teppen in late 2015. This time, Madoka got 1st place, with Sakiko tying for 2nd.

Sakiko graduated from AKB48 in 2015, and Madoka graduated from HKT48 in 2021. Both of them continued to participate in Teppen, before and after graduation. Sakiko won the 13th, 14th, 19th, and 20th Teppen competitions. Madoka never received 1st place again, nor did Sayuri. However, Madoka, like Sakiko, did release a solo album of piano music in 2020. Both Sakiko and Madoka are active in the entertainment industry and as pianists.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-03-11 05:03:03.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/throwaway426542 on 2024-03-11 04:47:29.

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Hello everyone, i stumbled across this subreddit randomly and seen this post by u/maverden

This is a very nice written up post and better than anything i could ever do, but it seems a big part of neopets history was missed out revolving the economy so im gonna do my best to expand on top of this

WHO AM I? My name is Jesse, if you played neopets at all in the 2007-2016ish era you would have probably seen me on the forums, i had my friend group like many but i mainly hung around the Avatar and Trade chat, with some casual bouts on the Battle Chat. You may have recognized some of my names jesse_on_ice, financial_crisis, arctic_troll etc. I was a notorious troll on neopets in my younger years and was constantly banned, most people either loved me or absolutely hated me there wasn't really any in-between, i was a nuisance. And most thought i cheated and this (at least a time) was not true. I was a fairly rich restocker/auction sniper/reseller. Then something changed. One day i got banned “for protection” on my main because i lent a friend 200 million neopoints for a stamp, banned for protection usually happens when tnt suspect your account was hacked. Long story short they wouldn't give my account back because of all my previous infractions and my antics on the boards, this is when i started on the cheating side of neopets. (early 2014)

Now that we have some of my backstory out of the way lets continue.

In March 2014 Jumpstart bought out neopets.com from Viacom, later that year around September the servers started migrating servers this caused massive lag and BIG problems for the long-term economy of neopets. From this migration of servers they wanted to keep the site active during the migration period, this caused the site to lag and this caused an unintended side effect. Item Duplication. Now if you dont know what Item duplication is and why its a big issue i implore you to google, but its quite simple the item is double

A friend of mine found this out on like the day the servers started migrating, i was one of the first people to know about it because she showed us on skype as a bug, and reported it to tnt as she was an honest player. The friend group she showed though, some of us were not so honest and the dupe was going to be found out eventually anyway. It was as simple as spam clicking an item. When you moved an item to say your gallery from your inventory a drop down menu would appear and you would click where to send the item, gallery, shop, safe box etc. Etc. Well when you spammed the confirmation box it would make unintended copies of that item. And you can see how this would easily be abused.

(also a side note and a funny story, there was a really rare and strong battledome item called the moehog skull you could only get by winning an expensive scratchcard, i actually won one and sold it for $140 USD right before the majority of people discovered the duping, it was a good business decision on my end since it devalued to shit)

Anyway back on topic, there was always a stable economy in neopets aside a few items

There was obviously the Darigan Sword of Death, which is a 1 of a kind item owned and sold by featheralley to a user (i forgot his name) for his gallery. Then there were other items which would always gain value because they were so old and rare some examples being retired items, smugglers cove items, prize code items etc. Etc.

These items would sell for 100s of millions of neopoints just to sit in somebodies' collection, and before the duping 100 million was a lot. Some of those items above were glossed over in the above post the Super Attack Pea is the one I'm going to talk about

the Attack Pea family was released in the smugglers cove, the smugglers cove was a rare event that would stock super rare items at the time only available for that event, so if you got a Super Attack Pea when they were released that was going to be the only time you could ever get one. And its been a while but im pretty sure they stocked at a certain time on a random minute, so it would be at 44 seconds on a certain minute for example. So you would refresh every minute at 44 seconds for example, but if you refreshed too often you could get banned from the cove for an hour. So it was always a luck and skill component (and a bit of internet speed, as you would need to fight the other people for it)

And if i remember correctly again, there was only 100 of each item released at the cove (i think later they offered more, but the early days it was only like 100 or 150)

Now for the fun part, these items got duped like fucking crazy, there were people like me who would do stuff like this just for fun because at the time i was a notorious troll, i would make a “fun auction” post on the forums and link to my auction trades and just see 8 of one of the rarest item in the game selling for funny numbers.

these at the time sold for over 500 million neopoints. And i had a lot more of these, i would estimate i had about 2000 of them.

And when the general public learned about this, this deflated every single item in the game. Well every rare notable item, i think our friend in the other post glossed over item rarities etc. Well the super super top end items people couldn't get ahold of to dupe just went up in value, widening that gap. because only select people had them. And those accounts were inactive or items so rare nobody thought about, or if they were duped it was in secret (a lot of rare items that were previously thought gone forever or so rare they may as well be gone forever came out over the next few months)

There were side effects however. A LOT of people got banned, innocent or not, people with duped items got banned. It actually killed the playerbase of an already dying game as neopets didn't have the best reputation as they were slowly releasing ways to kill the economy already making desirable things like krawk and draik neopet easily obtainable. (previously they were super rare, and weren't like other limited pets you could make on a certain day)

And you know what, as much as this dupe had an effect on the currency side of the game, it could have gotten worse, and if you were an avid neopets player and hunted avatars i apologize profusely, because this dupe also extended to games, you may have heard of bilge dice, well im not gonna bore you with the details, I'll just link you to the rules

Unfortunately, this game has been removed and you have me to thank. Because i found out an exploit using the same technique as duping where you just spam click the result to see if you won which would stack your points and completely broke the game. Keep in mind getting even 10 wins in a row in this for the avatar is extremely difficult and yet with the server migration creating all the lag this was possible, i released the method on the forums and the game got taken down a day later. I actually had a score of a 192 that i lost the screenshot of.

I would say I'm not proud of it, but that would be a lie, getting an entire game taken down because I was some dumb internet troll is just funny to me.

There was however 1 more hidden use of this duplication glitch, my friend Ana actually discovered this and she shared it with me, to my knowledge we were the only 2 people to know about this method which has since been patched (at least i hope so) this worked well after the duping had actually been solved because we were still doing this 2 years later.

The Money tree had an NC donation thing attached to it where you could refund your Neocash with an upcycle fortune cookie

and i actually again dont remember the specifics but you could donate 2 items a day and get some neocash back for those donations neocash for those who are unaware are used for special items with real world cash, not the regular ingame currency neopoints, either way you could buy this upcycle fortune cookie do the donate thing and its meant to be sort of like a recoup for items you no longer need or want, however if you spam clicked on the donate it would multiply the amount of neocash you got back, so instead of 25 you could get 250 etc. And this worked. And i didnt care too much about the cosmetics side of neopets so i never actually did anything with it, it was all for the “thrill” i guess but i made out with well over $40,000 USD of neocash that i could have easily sold offsite, i honestly should have but i didnt want to just implicate a bunch of random people in obvious fraud and at the time i was doing this i was kind of done with neopets.

I have a lot of stories about neopets including real life scandals, marriages, the drama in the neopets black market, and the notorious database leak (i acutally still have that somewhere) i know a LOT. So if there is anyone who is actually good at writing and played neopets and wants to collab feel free to hit me up, my remembering skills are a bit sketchy but with some research i could probably dig it all back up from my memory.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/serillymc on 2024-03-10 17:49:20.

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Before any of this starts, I need to lay out some context.

The Hell is a MCYT?

MCYT, for the unaware, is an acronym that stands for "Minecraft YouTubers", though in actuality it tends to refer to any online video creator regardless of platform who makes Minecraft content. Contrary to popular belief, MCYT isn't a new term - it was coined sometime in the early 2010s to refer to Team Crafted and its adjacent creators, with the earliest uses I could find going back to 2014.

I won't go into the entire history of the MCYT community as it isn't particularly relevant, though there are some things worth noting. First is that older MCYT fandoms were a lot closer to typical fandoms than the "standoms" of today, likely due to Twitter being less popular at the time.

Second is that in the mid-2010s, MCYT went into almost radio silence as Minecraft content simply wasn't popular anymore. While some people like Hermitcraft stayed afloat just fine, Minecraft content wouldn't really reach its past levels of popularity again until the creation of SMPLive in 2019, which is the topic of today's post.

What is SMPLive?

SMPLive was a SMP (survival multiplayer) server created by CallMeCarson (though in reality, it was cscoop's idea) in 2019, with the gimmick being that when online on the server, players must be streaming their perspective. The server popularized livestreamed SMPs as a genre and is a good portion of the reason why Dream SMP and now QSMP exists. The server was comedy-focused, though had a notable amount of roleplay elements with events such as a cult war against "Spawn City" (the hub city of the server) and various court cases, and streamers would often play up characters for the audience. The best way I could describe it would be like a Minecraft sitcom.

SMPLive gained an unexpected audience with teenage girls, who formed a fan community on Twitter known as "SMPtwt", which was a stan Twitter group dedicated to the members of the server. SMPtwt would get themselves into a lot of controversies, but most of them aren't relevant to the topic at hand. There was also a notable following on Tumblr, known as SMPblr, which mainly seems to trace its origins back to 2018 Mineblr and Hermitblr (the Hermitcraft fandom on Tumblr) and tended to have very different views than SMPtwt (which will become relevant later on).

One side note regarding Hermitblr that is a topic for another post, but should at least be mentioned, is that a group of Hermitblr members actually harassed Hermitcraft member ZombieCleo off Tumblr for saying that if you have a problem with shipping, you should just block shippers instead of posting hate. This would set a precedent for MCYT fandom prioritizing their own moral beliefs over the wants of the people they claim to be fans of, which alongside the effects of SMPRonpa's aftermath, still affects the fandom to this day.

Survival of the Fittest

In late 2019, a young fan on Wattpad would begin publishing their Danganronpa AU fanfiction known as "SMPRonpa: Survival of the Fittest". Unbeknownst to them, this fic would gain a lot of popularity on SMPtwt, with fans livetweeting about updates and creators even noticing.

That's right! Despite what would go down later, most content creators who acknowledged SMPRonpa did so positively - joking about it and discussing it with fans, chatting with the author, etc. One creator, ToxxxicSupport, would even defend it, saying it's "purely based on entertainment just like a horror movie would be - no one would ever want us to actually get hurt".

SMPblr, on the other hand, was vehemently opposed to the fic, and well, fanfiction in general, honestly, regardless of content - anything they considered "stan shit". These are beliefs they would claim to be based in the desire to not make content creators uncomfortable, though like with early Hermitblr's shipping war, a lot of it was based more in their own ideas of what's morally okay in fandom rather than anything a content creator had said themselves.

Regardless, the fic would be completed in December 2019, but what was to follow would permanently affect how the MCYT fandom would treat fanworks.

And before I forget to mention it, the freezer thing in the title is a joke related to a death in the fanfic that's been heavily memed even long after the fanfic was deleted - in which Slimecicle is hit over the head with a guitar and stuffed in a freezer. It's constantly poked fun at by fans and Charlie himself for its absurdity. Here's a funny clip of Sneegsnag joking about it.

Let's Address Fan Culture

On December 11, 2019, CallMeCarson would go live with a starting soon screen that simply contained the message:

this is gonna be a serious stream addressing some bullshit fan culture that has creeped my friends and I out. If you're coming here for laughs I'm sorry but occasionally I have to address more serious topics. I recommend going to schlatt's stream if you came here for fun or you are just an average viewer who doesn't care. he is playing Rabbids Go Home

(This would go on to be a widely mocked copypasta among both fans and other content creators.)

In this stream, Carson would go on to disavow various elements of "fan culture" that he claimed made him and his friends uncomfortable. While several topics were discussed, the most relevant to today's topic is that he would single out and discuss SMPRonpa by name.

This would lead to a wave of harassment and threats towards its teenage author, who was not expecting this to happen. They would follow their promise to delete the fanfic if someone mentioned being uncomfortable, and the fanfic was gone. In 2021 they would return to make this comment about the harassment they faced. (TW: mentions of death threats and suicidal thoughts)

The "serious stream" would also lead to the creation of the blog smp-boundaries which is now somewhat infamous for being outdated and sometimes including unsourced and misleading information, but was weaponized in many a fan discourse argument.

Lost to Time

And for 3 years, it was gone. Completely lost to time, with only snippets transcribed from screenshots that floated around what remained of SMPtwt and the controversy left to prove it ever existed. And a lot of people thought, given it was published on Wattpad (which makes it significantly difficult to download works) and the timeframe, that it would never resurface.

A lot of people would search. It became sort of the white whale of lost media related to MCYT - everyone wanted to read it, out of morbid curiosity or genuine interest.

It's probably also worth noting that in 2021, CallMeCarson would be exposed for sexual misconduct with fans and completely disavowed by his former friends and co-workers. Some of these friends and co-workers would also speak about their own experiences with Carson, with Schlatt saying he had lied to him about seeking therapy when Schlatt just wanted to see him improve, and his former roommate Noah Hugbox recounting Carson's rude treatment of him and their other two roommates Cscoop and Traves in an interview (something that would be corroborated in Schlatt's video, where he mentions hearing horror stories from Carson's roommates).

Years went past, and the fic continued to remain lost, but it became sort of an urban legend, a warning fans would tell each other. During the height of Among Us and Squid Game's popularity, you'd hear people mention SMPRonpa as a "what not to do".

Additionally, with no way to verify the fic's content, rumors would spread making it out to be a lot worse than it is. While SMPRonpa, in actuality, was a violent (but not notably graphic) fanfiction based on a video game, with time it became this boogeyman of a fic to avoid becoming the next iteration of, a gory mess about killing content creators and their families in real life. (Note: No content creator families are involved in SMPRonpa at all, besides one very short flashback with no violence.)

The Triumphant Return

On January 5, 2024 - ironically, the same day 3 years ago that CallMeCarson would be exposed - I was sent a copy of SMPRonpa by an anonymous individual. A full copy.

I knew it was real - everything lined up perfectly with the many screenshots I had collected over the years. We finally had our white whale.

And so, I published the copy, with a note asking the reader to not seek out the author, who had - on and wanted nothing to do with the fic any...

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Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bbeukt/minecraft_youtube_harassment_lost_media_and/

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Jagosyo on 2024-03-09 06:09:41.

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This is my first hobbydrama post and it's recounting some drama that happened slightly before I joined the hobby. So I hope you will bear with me regarding sourcing. I like history, I like learning new things, I don't actually enjoy hunting for drama that much.

First, some context.

Star Wars action figures have a long and storied history which I won't recount much of here. What you mainly need to know is the license originally went to Kenner and played a significant part in making them a relative giant in the toy industry. Producing 3.75 inch figures (1/18 scale) that became an industry standard, many a child in the ancient years of 1977-1985 enjoyed the wonders of Star Wars through Kenner toys.

But what does one do when they are no longer a child and longs for the nostalgia of yesteryear? They pay exorbitant amounts for unopened figures and convince themselves plastic in a box is display art of course! Discontinued in 1985 to lagging sales and renewed in 1995 to capitalize on movie remasters, a new line of Star Wars figures coming from Kenner (Now owned since 1991 by Hasbro) appeared. They actually looked good and not like questionably carved lumps of plastic! Incredible. The golden age of Star Wars Action Figure collecting had arrived.

We now skip ahead a few years in our tale. It is a dark time for the galaxy. Kenner's headquarters were closed in the year 2000 and their product lines merged into Hasbro. George Lucas releases his well-regarded prequel masterpieces and Star Wars toys line an entire isle in Toys R Us. George Lucas's prequel masterpieces turn out to be not so well-regarded and Toys R Us closes because some asshole decided to dump debt onto them and then declare bankruptcy. The mighty isles of Star Wars toys eventually fall silent.

But what's this? A New Hope on the horizon?! Disney purchases Star Wars?! Sequel movies are being made?! They'll be good?! This can only mean one thing. More Star Wars Action Figures.

You now have the context to begin our story. You see Star Wars collecting had become a big thing, and it makes up a reasonable (in times, perhaps the majority) of sales of figures. The most die-hard of these adult collectors have been collecting a long time and have large, sealed in-box collections of figured taking up space on their walls. They obviously want to continue expanding this collection of matching boxes, and Hasbro wants money so a compromise is made in the Senate.

Hasbro releases not one, not two, but three Star Wars action figures lines. The first two, Retro and Vintage, are 3.75 inch and styled after the original 1977 line and the 1995 line respectively. The third, 2013's Black Series, are about 6 inches (1/12 scale) and more expensive. We are interested in the third.

I can't really say what the original plans for the Black Series line was, because that's ancient history I wasn't around for. The initial few years of the figures were... Not good. Bad sculpts, horrific faces, over production of expensive figures for a unproven block of sequels meant the line struggled. Star Wars mania meant the line didn't die.

By the release of Rise of Skywalker things were looking grim for Star Wars, but had improved for Black Series. It was still expensive, but new improvements in action figure technology meant the faces looked good now. Whatever the line had originally been intended to be, it was now squarely aimed at adult collectors looking for Star Wars characters to display on the shelves and rising prices mostly excluded anyone but that market.

Oh, also there were life-size replicas of helmets and lightsabers under the Black Series logo, nobody sane knows why. We're not talking about it*

This finally brings us to our tale, if you are unaware, Hasbro actually makes a number of nostalgia bait toy lines aimed at adult collectors now. They sell these through retailers and the Hasbro Pulse site, where you can also find The HASLAB. Haslab is basically a crowd funded effort to get particularly high-budget items into the hands of collectors that Hasbro might not otherwise be willing to make. Basically it's a bit like Kickstarter, buyers will make a pledge for a product and if that product meets a certain number of pledges, Hasbro will make it for everyone who pledged (and paid of course). Additionally, meeting certain pledge thresholds means Hasbro can afford producing some extras to go along with your expensive piece of plastic. All in all, it's a good system that lets people get things they wouldn't otherwise, like a 27 inch, $575 Unicron.

In 2021, the Black Series got their turn. The very first Haslab Black Series and oh boy is it a doozy, The Rancor. For the low price of $350, a 1/12 scale rancor could be yours! If enough backers are met, you could also get some fabulous additions! A Gamorrean Guard! A bunch of...skulls and cardboard! Salacious Crumb! Luke Skywalker! We've had three of those figures released before!

...Now if you are a Star Wars fan, you may perhaps be wondering about some notable, shall we say, absences from that list of figures. Malakili would be later added to the base funding line of the Rancor after some very negative feedback, but that negative feedback was in large part centered around one other character.

Oola

The unfortunate ill-fated dancer at Jabba's Palace has a rather interesting toy history. She's only appeared in 1/18 scale twice, once as a mail-away that a lot of people missed and made her one of the more valuable figures for a while and once as a Wal-mart exclusive alongside Jabba himself. She's never appeared in 1/12 scale. Why? Well probably because she's a female side character with a few seconds screen time. Traditionally those aren't terrible popular with kids. You also kind of need Jabba to go along with her, which raises the price on buying them together instead of say, Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia. Also, possibly, Lucasfilm didn't want to deal with moms complaining about little Jimmy seeing a half-naked lady from his favorite Star Wars movie on the toy isle. Who knows?

THE FANS KNOW! You see this isn't the only snub for a scantly clad Star Wars lady. Slave Leia, AKA Jabba's slave outfit, AKA Huttslayer Leia, AKA that poster you had on your wall has had exactly one Star Wars Black Series release in the product's first year and it is an abomination

Why would Hasbro do this? Why would they not make a beloved cultural icon for young teenage men everywhere with the new photo-real facepainting technology? Why would they not include Oola in the Rancor's backer rewards? There's only one possible option. Conspiracy! Disney, Hasbro and Lucasfilm were conspiring to keep scantly clad female Star Wars characters out of the hands of adult collectors because of the unfortunate implications of sex slavery in GEORGE LUCAS'S STAR WARS!

Meanwhile, Yakface (Not his real name), a prominent leaker and source of news of shipping data for Star Wars products, mostly Black Series and Vintage Collection, posts a funny slogan on his twitter which is preserved on reddit here. This accidentally sparked a rallying cry for wrongfully deprived adult collectors of their scantily clad female action figures. No Oola. No Moolah. They would not be denied by woke Disney, Hasbro and Lucasfilm. NO OOLA NO MOOLAH!

Yeah so the Rancor didn't get funded.

If you clicked the link up earlier you might have noticed, 500 backers off. There was anger, there was finger pointing, there were ragebait videos. There was a Megathread

It wasn't really Yakface's fault. He got pointed at as a scapegoat by a few people, but generally most people agree it was a mix of poor backing rewards (Nobody wanted cardboard murals), bad communication (Yakface did more promotional work on the Rancor's funding stages and the addition of Malakili than Hasbro's socials did) and an expensive price point for a relatively young toy line (Most adults with Star Wars money collect Vintage Collection).

As for a supposed ban on Slave Leia and Oola, both have been featured as merchandise in Disney's parks.

Haslab has been a relatively successful program. Funding about 75% of their projects. Notably, the only other Black Series item, the Third Sister Lightsaber Replica* has not been funded.

Well, that's the sad tale of the Rancor. Never to grace our non-existent shelf space with his glorious girth. The only prototype that exists probably sits on some executives table or some Hasbro museum somewhere. Which would make for an excellent heist movie, but not a very good funding reward.

Disclaimers:

I don't care how you wish to display your figures, in box, out of box, it's your figure! Do what you want.

I would've paid $350 for the Rancor, fortunately for my wallet I missed it.

I'd like scantily clad women for my Star Wars collection.

Please reline the Replica Helmets and Lightsabers to something less confusing Hasbro, thank you*

*I lied.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/imnanbaboya on 2024-03-06 20:26:56.

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Quick Definitions

TVXQ are a K-pop group, a very long-lasting and frankly iconic one. They just caught up on their 20 year anniversary (and released their first Korean album in, like, 4 years!) last year, having debuted at the end of 2003, and they have as colorful as a history as that kind of lifespan suggests. Previous write-ups on this subreddit have covered things such as lawsuits, gay shipping, and crazy stalkers — that (and the fact that they have multiple write-ups here in the first place) says a lot about what kind of stuff TVXQ got involved with. Since this story takes place in 2004, TVXQ will be treated as they were then: a fresh-faced, 5-member group taking over the scene.

A few other terms to know would be Cassiopeia or Cassies, referring to TVXQ's fandom; SM Entertainment, the company that made and manages TVXQ; and rotation, referring to changing out members of a group. Other than that, if you're familiar with K-pop terminology, you shouldn't have much problem navigating this. So, let's set the scene.

(Also, a note before we start — a majority of the posts linked here will be in Korean, as most English fan forums from the time are long gone. I can't speak much about what happened overseas, but there is this blog post from an international Cassie who was there at the time. It's a good read — I recommend it for those wanting a first-hand account. I wasn't there at the time, so I can only repeat and make inferences from what I read!)

The Rotation Rumors

It was 2004. After a 2-single run, TVXQ had just released their 1st full album, TRI-ANGLE, and their fanbase was as strong as ever. With this album came a "storybook" like their previous releases — a "storybook" in TVXQ terms is like your normal K-pop photobook but with more stuff. This storybook, however, came with even more stuff than usual; most importantly, it contained essays written from the group members' perspective. One of these essays explained the process of forming the group: SM divided trainees into groups, choosing their lead vocalists to create a "dream team." That was describing past events, as the storybook explicitly stated that this "dream team" was TVXQ’s predecessor. But the statement following, saying that SM was preparing various solo "projects" for the members of TVXQ, intensified the misconception. Cassiopeias — TVXQ’s fandom — saw this as TVXQ being a project group where members could leave for solo activities and be replaced. They could be replaced! They could be replaced, and no fan wants a group where their bias could disappear willy-nilly.

So TVXQ fans got worried. At first, it started as simple talk of a Chinese member, and fans were up in arms at SM Entertainment, TVXQ’s company. As far as taking action, some talked about boycotting TVXQ related products and protesting in front of SM (A fun note is that those who actually did protest in front of SM were told exactly what SM would say time and time again... that no one was being replaced). TVXQ’s fanbase slanted young back then, so a lot of people believed the rumor without questioning, but some cast doubt on this affair. All the while, during an uncertain time in Cassieland, one forum came upon the nation — a little place called the "Seryun Sejun Official Anti Cafe."

Seryun Sejun, Please Disappear

There were scattered talks of a Seryun Sejun before the big fuss. Apparently, the "Seryun" part comes from a stage name the youngest member, Changmin, was supposed to have before going with Max. (TVXQ’s stage names were formatted like [stage name] [real first name], e.g. U-Know Yunho.) Back then, the rumor was the same, with Sejun replacing one of the original TVXQs, but nobody had any reason to believe it. Now, though, everybody was looking for a name to this menace, and Seryun Sejun came like a five course meal to a starving child.

The "Seryun Sejun Official Anti Cafe" (세륜세준 공식 안티카페) was founded on November 19, 2004, around the same time the rotation rumors gained traction. I don’t think the place started the rumors — it probably started from whisperings by the same people who spouted them in the previous months — but it’s a very important site in Sejun history. SGA, as it shortened itself (based on its Korean initials), was hosted on the (still-existent) Daum Cafe service, a place where anyone can make their own community. Think of it as a mix between a web forum and Reddit. But SGA paid host to a curious image of an incomplete TVXQ. Taken from the same storybook that started the mess, the picture depicts 4 members of the original TVXQ — U-Know Yunho (whose name I should note is misspelled in the picture as "Yunno"), Xia Junsu, Micky Yoochun, and Max Changmin — but where Jaejoong should be, a stranger is in his place. As this picture was on the front page of the Seryun Sejun Official Anti Cafe, this stranger was purported to be none other than Sejun, who would take Jaejoong’s spot in TVXQ.

The day after SGA's founding, SM stated to news outlets that they wouldn’t be changing out anyone. At the time, the rumor was still new, so with SM's statement it looked like it was starting to cool down. TVXQ fans were still worried, though, and they were still flaunting the "5 - 1 = 0" mentality. (Silly TVXQ fans, that's not how math works!) But on November 21, 2004, something happened that would set the scandal aflame.

The Yoochun Crying Incident, and the Endless Rumor Mill

The 326th episode of Inkigayo, a show where K-pop artists come to perform and promote their songs, was aired on the 21st of November 2004. One of the many highly regarded artists appearing on that day was TVXQ, who sang their song "I Believe" — but during the performance, Yoochun burst into tears. Not just domestic fans, but international fans got worried — what could have driven Yoochun to tears? The answer that many Korean fans came to was that it was the member rotation. From this point, things got serious.

Sejun became the TVXQ fandom's number one enemy in the blink of an eye. Not only was he going to replace Jaejoong, he had also made Yoochun cry! Everyone wanted to know who this menace was, and they flooded to SGA, making it reach 1,000 members by the 22nd. Some fans were enraged — like any good anti, Sejun's detractors made disparaging nicknames, the most common of which being Segyun (meaning "virus" in Korean). Some used a calmer, more polite approach to protect TVXQ, believing the rumor, while skeptics kept their heads on the ground. Others thought more positively of Sejun, though they were not the majority by far. What's definite is that a large amount of Cassies were under the impression that this was happening — there were pictures of this interloper, letters apparently written by members' friends, even news articles seemingly confirming it. (We'll get to those later.) It was an emergency situation.

But the funniest part of this is the rumor mill. The most consistent claim was that Sejun was Chinese, due to SM saying in another statement that they were planning to add a Chinese member. Sometimes Sejun was the son of Lee Soo-man, founder of SM Entertainment and number two enemy of Cassies at this point. There was that one post that claimed Jaejoong was in a coma and that 2 Cassies had ended their own lives? And according to one Naver KnowledgeIN post, Jaejoong joined YG after being replaced by Sejun. Then there was Makkang Joongi, someone who I couldn't fit into the main section. Makkang Joongi had already been floating around before the rotation rumors, and after them he made a bit of a comeback as another potential replacer. This "Makkang" figure was actually the actor Lee Joongi, who was an SM trainee when TVXQ was being planned. From this, p...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-03-05 05:38:49.

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TW: Bullying

Before we begin, a glossary of terms for those who may need one. In particular, 'graduation' (a voluntary retirement of a given VTuber identity, whether indie or corporate) will come up a lot; the other specific term is '[Virtual] Livers' (rhyming with 'divers'), Nijisanji's specific term for its VTubers.

Writing this in early March 2024, chances are that the name 'Nijisanji' will ring a bell if you have engaged with just about any online space with even the slightest connection to weeb fandoms in the last few weeks. The scandal resulting from the termination of Nijisanji English's Selen Tatsuki on 7 February has become a matter of considerable attention reaching well outside the VTuber bubble, and may well hang over the agency for the rest of its existence. But it's worth remembering that this was not the first scandal to rock Nijisanji, and especially not the first to revolve around its international branches. The recent blow-up has some rather older precedents.

Where did Nijisanji come from?

On 29 November 2016, tech startup Activ8 debuted Kizuna AI, voiced and acted by Kasuga Nozomi, as the first self-proclaimed 'Virtual YouTuber'. Unbeknownst to her creators, their apparent dominance of the medium was not to last. AI's time as the face of the industry was to end in flames in 2019, as Activ8's attempts to follow through on their original vision of the 'eternal idol' ran up against a fandom that had developed its own set of expectations about VTubing, driven by the proliferation of new VTuber personas that had become inextricably tied to the talents behind them. And at the arguable forefront of that movement was Nijisanji.

Nijisanji, officially styled NIJISANJI and often informally stylised as 2434 (ni shi san shi), is the brainchild of Riku Tazumi (born c.1996), who dropped out of his studies at Waseda University in 2017 to establish Ichikara Inc, and set to work developing a Live2D tracking app, offering a much cheaper and less labour-intensive alternative to the full-body studio 3D then in vogue. On 11 January 2018, Ichikara publicly unveiled Nijisanji, the name of its official app, and opened auditions; eight successful applicants debuted from 8 to 16 February. Nijisanji's bursting onto the scene with Live2D arguably kicked off modern VTubing as we know it, leading competitors like Cover to copy the format, and paving the way for an eventual explosion in the number of independent VTubers as the cost of entry continued to fall. Aggregator site Userlocal would claim that there were over 1000 VTubers by the end of March, and 6000 by the end of the year; 61 belonged to Nijisanji. (source).

We could get bogged down in early Nijisanji history forever, but the meat of this story requires us to leave Japan and 2018 behind and move away in both space and time. Before we get to that, though, why do Japanese VTuber agencies set up overseas operations, anyway?

Why expand overseas?

Even today, the exact limit of the Japanese market for VTubers is not really known, but from the very beginning, the industry has been keenly aware both of the eventual limits of the domestic space and the potential room for growth in foreign markets that will be receptive to Japanese cultural exports. Rarely has a media company sought to have less of an audience. But we also ought to account for the fact that a lot of VTuber agencies have their origins as tech startups, where you get a lot of initial funding and then need to find a way to become profitable before it runs out. Overseas expansion carries with it a certain amount of risk, but when there is only so much money before it all runs out, those are risks that may need taking.

Where to first?

If you look at the history of the major VTuber ventures, it is notable that their first priority of expansion has usually been China, then other Asian regions, and then finally the English-language market, if they ever get there. Regional markets are just easier logistically (both in terms of timezone difference and in terms of shipping for physical goods), and presumed to be more predictable in terms of spending, and historically, the largest of these markets has been the Chinese one. Activ8 did some limited English outreach with Kizuna AI, but their experiment with Multiple AI explicitly included one voice actor to serve as her Mandarin voice. Hololive's overseas expansion went in the order China -> Indonesia -> English. Brave Group, whose modus operandi has often revolved around buying up existing ventures rather than introducing its own, acquired the Chinese agency MUGEN-LIVE in 2022, and only started an English-language branch with V4Mirai the year after. What I'm saying is that we in the Anglosphere have tended to be a pretty distant, fourth-tier concern for the Japanese VTuber industry. Nijisanji would be no exception.

Only Nijixon could go to China

When I earlier wrote that Nijisanji debuted 61 Livers in its first 10 months, that was not entirely true. Nijisanji had licensed its app and its branding to a different company, who proceeded to launch Nijisanji Shanghai and Nijisanji Taipei, each of 8 members, at the end of August 2018. In other words, some 77 people signed on to become official Nijisanji talents that year.

Trying to find out what exactly happened to 二次三次虚拟主播企划 (er ci san ci xuni zhubo qihua, or 'Nijisanji Virtual Streamer Project'; evidently sometimes shortened to '"Nijisanji" Project') is tricky given the relative lack of attention from back in the day and the retroactive scrubbing of a lot of material. Thanks to /u/kirandra I was put on to this writeup concerning Nijisanji Shanghai, but this too is a rather later retrospective. Probably the only comprehensive timeline comes from the relevant page on Chinese ACGN wiki Moegirl.org.cn, which has no citations. So, bear in mind that the following is pretty dry and summative because I have to work with what I could find.

On 8 July 2018, a Facebook page for Nijisanji Taipei emerged, with a cover image featuring silhouettes of its eight members. The project would be formally announced on the 17th on Facebook (focussing on Taipei), Bilibili (focussing on Shanghai), and Weibo (ditto) with auditions open until the 27th. Over the course of the next few weeks, promo images would be teased until, on 24 August, both branches formally began debuting talents.

The debut announcement simply said that Nijisanji had partnered with unspecified 'local company/ies' (在地企業), something which may at the time have been seen as innocuous but which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a bit of a major red flag. Per the summary by Shitantan in the linked writeup, it very quickly became apparent that the quality of models in both instances was noticeably poorer than what was on offer from Nijisanji's main branch. Things got worse after debut, as rumour had it that agency management were abusive towards their talents, linked to a continual wave of graduations from the Shanghai branch which began in November with the exit of Siddel. By March 2019, only one of eight remained, Saitania Liun Linse, and her graduation had already been announced and scheduled for that June (in the event, she brought it forward to 10 May). In mid-February, Monmon would be the first Taipei member to graduate.

The news then came, in late March or early April 2019, that 'Nijisanji' Project's affiliation with Ichikara would cease, and the remaining seven members of Nijisanji Taipei, along with Saitania, would rebrand as VEgo. This was formally announced on 2 April on both Weibo (this was their final post on the site) and Facebook, although the process of rebranding had started a little earlier. VEgo trundled along for another year, but continued losing members until the final one, Talency, left on 31 March 2020, having been alone at the agency since the departure of Siarurin on 8 February. And so came the end of Nijisanji's first overseas foray. Whatever specific events behind the scenes caused all these exits may never be known at this point, but clearly neither the setup nor the management of the two branches was done with particularly great competence.

Tangent: It is commonly asserted across several sites, primarily wikis (including Moegirl, Chinese Wikipedia, and the Virtual YouTubers Wiki on Fandom.com), that Nijisanji's partner was the Japanese-owned, Taiwan-centred influencer and marketing firm, Capsule Inc., with considerable inconsistency over whether it was the 'core' business in Taiwan, its (now-defunct) Hong Kong subsidiary, ...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/lupinedreaming on 2024-03-04 18:49:23.

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The Beginning of the Journey:

Allow me to set the scene: It is the late 2000s. It is after school, and you are a young teen with too much internet access and no social life. What do you do? You go visit one of your favorite forums to lurk on — phantomoftheopera.com.

You browse around for a bit, trying to decide what thread you’d like to read. You settle on one that’s something about a hidden plot and symbolism in the 2004 adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera musical.

As you begin to read, you are very confused. The author of this thread is talking about lens flares, lighting, and camera angles all pointing to a secret, secondary plot hidden within the movie. All of this, the OP says, was completely intentional on the director’s part. Even though you are at an age where you’ll believe some pretty far fetched stuff, this still sounds TOO out there for you.

Unknowingly, you have stumbled across what has infamously become known in the POTO fandom as the Hidden Plot.

Explaining the Hidden Plot (Kind of):

You may be asking, “What exactly IS the Hidden Plot?”

Good question, and one that is a little complicated to answer due in part to the fact that many sites that hosted threads about the Hidden Plot are now lost to the internet sands of time. It seems they can’t even be accessed via the Wayback Machine. (Trust me, I tried.)

So, I’ve done my best to cobble together an overview based on the recollections of POTO fans who were there when this theory was being actively posted, as well as info provided in this Google doc, which has direct quotes from the author of the Hidden Plot. The doc was helpfully provided by glassprism on Tumblr (thank you!).

I have made sense of the Hidden Plot based on the above linked doc, this post from rjdaae, and a summary of the Hidden Plot on the FFnet bio seemingly written by the main author of the theory. I’m not going to link her bio so no one leaves her mean comments.

A Summary of the Hidden Plot:

The basic idea of this fan theory is that there is a second, deeper story embedded into the 2004 POTO movie. This story is conveyed through cinematography, lighting, clothing, sets, the placement of props, and more. The Hidden Plot is as follows:

Erik is literally the King of Music. What does that mean? Well, I’m not sure what it means beyond the fact that he feels he is in charge of the opera house, but I think there’s some supernatural element. Christine is his Queen of Music, naturally.

Speaking of a supernatural element, in the Hidden Plot, the “Phantom” is not a persona that Erik uses. Oh, no, the Phantom is a literal evil spirit that possesses Erik sometimes.

Raoul factors into this by being a Priest of Light (I’m also not sure what that means) and is … ERIK’S BROTHER!! Yep.

Somehow, Christine and Raoul save Erik from the clutches of the evil spirit, and Christine and Erik become King and Queen of Music and go off into the light. (Or something like that.)

Wait … What? Where Did the Theory Author Get This Stuff From?

Like I mentioned earlier, apparently this Hidden Plot is revealed through EXTREMELY subtle “clues.”

I’ll give a couple examples of the theory author’s own words, which were compiled in the Google doc:

Evidence for Erik being King of Music:

“** ERIK: “Since the moment I first heard you sing, I have needed you with me to serve me to sing, for my music, my music”

“** These also seem like key words that Erik is king of music. This is his kingdom. He wants her to serve him as his queen, to sing for him, and he uses "me"--first person, showing Phantom is gone. (Kings send a servant {or more} to do their bidding and bring s person to them for an audience, just as what happened when the Phantom went to collect Christine and bring her to the king. The Don Juan song shows that is what happened.)”

Example of using the movie’s lighting to hint at the Hidden Plot:

“** When he helps her out of the boat, a long ray of blue light goes across her head, followed by another blue ray of light going through his middle--his heart (spirit). (This isn't just about being a reflection from the light—because if it were it should logically have happened many more times all the times they showed white light, and didn’t. It happens other times in story, and always in the same places on their bodies, sometimes without any white light showing.) Also, as he sings to her "Turn your face away from the garish light of day"--another blue line of light goes across his back (his middle, where his heart would be).”

Evidence that Raoul is Erik’s brother:

“** Because the white horse is symbolic of Raoul and they made a point of putting it next to the family crests in Erik’s lair, I believe this is a clue showing Raoul is a relation (Erik’s brother), and that Erik is actually a de Chagny. Count de Chagny to be exact.”

What Are the Origins of the Hidden Plot? Who Came Up With It?

I thought that the Hidden Plot originated circa 2007-2009, which is when I was actively lurking on POTO.com and saw it pop up there.

However, it appears to date back further than this.

According to rjdaae and this forum thread, the Hidden Plot first popped up shortly after the 2004 film. Its first home was on the WB message boards, and then moved to different forums across the internet. As I mentioned earlier, it appears that all of these forums are now gone, and all that remains of the Hidden Plot are pieces saved in the aforementioned Google doc and people’s recollections of threads discussing the Hidden Plot. But I digress.

As for who came up with the Hidden Plot, according to ya-chai 2 in this forum thread, two unnamed people first came up with the Hidden Plot, but its most fervent advocate and writer was someone who used to go by the username Honeyphan.

However, the idea that it was created by two other people shpuld be taken with a grain of salt, as that’s the only source I’ve found saying the theory was made by someone other than Honeyphan.

At any rate, who IS Honeyphan? Based on old profiles of hers I found, she is/was a huge fan of the 2004 POTO film and created lots of fanfic and photomanips for it. She appears to be a pleasant enough person and a very dedicated fan with some unusual inclinations toward the conspiratorial, if the Hidden Plot is anything to go by.

What was the Fan Reaction to This?

Largely the fan reaction seemed to be, and still is, skeptical amusement. POTO fans generally do not seem to hate the Hidden Plot but find it very silly and entertaining.

However, based on fans’ recollections, there was a group of very dedicated people who discussed and espoused this theory.

Quoting again from ya-chai 2 again, it sounds like proponents of the Hidden Plot might have brought their passion into the real world:

“At one point there were supposedly sessions where forum members met at each other's houses to discuss it. That's all I know about that.

“I do know that both Gerard Butler and Patrick Wilson were asked by members of the WB forum if they were aware of any hidden story. Both actors denied knowing anything about a so called hidden story.”

If you’re a very charitable and understanding person, you might be wondering why the Hidden Plot had any attention at all. After all, there are lots of POTO AUs out there, and this could pass as one.

The reason why it has gotten so much attention over the years is very well explained in this post by ancientphantom: “What differentiated it from regular shipping and fanfic-writing was A) the extreme insistence that it was actually part of the movie and not invented by fans, and B) the willingness to create “evidence” out of the most ridiculous details, including the timing of random lens flares, what shoes everyone is wearing, how we should interpret hairstyles, and of course the memorable Stockinggate.”

What Can We Conclude from All of This?

My general takeaway is that the Hidden Plot is an early example of something we’ve seen in other fandoms in more recent years — intense fans insisting that a conspiracy theory surrounding their favorite piece of media IS real. I think the best example of this phenomenon is the Johnlock Conspiracy.

The Johnlock Conspiracy actually has a lot in common with the Hidden Plot, imo, in that proponents of both pointed to subtle clues planted in cinematography, decor, etc., which revealed the “true” story.

But yeah, that’s about it! That’s what I could dig up about the Hidden Plot.

If you’d like to see some additional insight from POTO fans who were there when this was being written, you can check out the comments of this write up that I also posted on r/box5

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-03-04 06:34:11.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-02-26 05:01:11.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Once again, a reminder to check out the Best Of winners for 2023!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-02-19 05:01:05.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Once again, a reminder to check out the Best Of winners for 2023!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

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Hogwarts Legacy discussion is still banned.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/maverden on 2024-02-16 14:17:15.

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I can't tell you how excited I am to make one of those r/hobbydrama posts with an incomprehensible title that makes perfect sense by the end.

In my previous post, I gave a broad overview of some of the stranger parts of the history of Neopets, going back pretty much to the site's founding. Now I'm back again, to document some newer drama that's unfolded over the past year-and-a-bit. But first, some background.

What is Neopets? I went over this quite extensively in my previous post, so please refer to that if you want a detailed rundown. In brief, Neopets is a browser game, founded in late 1999, in which you create virtual pets and explore the fictional world of Neopia through them. The site has changed ownership several times over its history, which I'll discuss later.

Neopets is akin to a sandbox game. There are many different activities which can be explored separately from each other. Most players dabble in a bunch of different things, but many also have one or two aspects of the game that they're especially involved in. New content gets released daily, and for a site with 24 years of history that's a lot of content.

A few notes that will become relevant:

TNT: Short for The Neopets Team, the group who work on the game. Includes programmers, artists, moderators, and so on - even a company lawyer at one point. Someone in the comments of my previous post described the relationship between TNT and the players as parasocial. While this was more true 10-20 years ago, it remains a good descriptor - players have an odd fascination with the various staff members and their roles. At its best, this creates a sort of synergy, with memes and in-jokes forming a bond between players and staff.

Neopoints: Abbreviated NP, the in-game currency. Mainly used for buying and selling items. To provide a sense of scale, a casual player might get 20,000-50,000 NP per day from dailies. In many ways, it's significantly easier to earn NP now than in earlier years of the site.

Items: Many parts of Neopets revolve around obtaining different items, which you can keep in your inventory (which has limited capacity) or store in your safety deposit box (which is effectively infinite and protects you from random events). Items can be bought and sold using NP. Some items can be bought from NPC shops, others are available from other sources. Users can also buy or sell items to each other.

Some item types include books, which you can read to your pet (but each can only be read once); food, wearable items to customize your pet's appearance, paint brushes to change your pet's color and aesthetic, weapons for battling, and stamps and other collectable items. These last two categories will be major points of this post. Stamps can be put into a stamp album, and other users can view your collection. The stamp album is divided into different pages, each following a theme, and each stamp occupies a specific spot on a specific page. Currently there are 43 pages, with 25 stamps each (although not all pages are complete - which is to say, there are spots for which no stamp currently exists).

Items have numerical rarity levels, which will also be a focal point several times in this writeup. I'll put a brief explanation here; skip this quoted block if you don't care about the technical details.

Items with rarity 1-99 are buyable from the main, NPC-run shops. Items appear (restock) in these main shops at semi-random intervals several times an hour. The higher an item's rarity, the less often it appears. Rarity 99 (r99) items barely ever show up, and as such can be very expensive on the secondary market

Items with rarity 101-179 are "Special", a broad category that refers to any items not available from the main shops. These items may be obtained from dailies, events or plots, random events, and a variety of other sources. The vast majority of Special items are r101 - since there's no distinction between items in this rarity range, the dev team can afford to be lazy here. There are a few other rarity categories, but they won't become important here.

Most aspects of the game have a wide difficulty curve. In other words, activities are very easy to get into, but become very, very, very hard to excel in beyond a certain point.

Want to read books to your pet? There are about 300 books priced at 1000 NP or less. You'll probably get 2 or 3 books for free just doing your dailies. But if you want to get your pet on the monthly high-score table for the number of (unique) books read? Be prepared to spend several years and hundreds of millions of NP just to get to the very bottom of the top 100.

Want to collect avatars, which are basically secret achievements that double as icons you can use on the on-site messageboards, the Neoboards? You can rack up like 60 in an afternoon with a bit of clicking. Want to, again, get on the monthly high-score table - which comes with its own avatar? Better get to playing those old Flash games really well, because avatar scores are absurdly hard.

Want to collect stamps? Again, you'll probably pick up a few doing your dailies. Want to get all 25 stamps on a single page and earn the associated avatar for that page? That sound you're faintly hearing is the entire playerbase laughing at you while also sobbing.

Now, this all sounds like a good way to keep your players motivated - after all, there are always more goals to strive for! But consider how both the demographics and competitors have evolved over time.

Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, we were all elementary and middle school kids making our first accounts. We had all the time in the world to pour into getting really good at a game. And Neopets' competitors - other browser games - all had more or less the same idea; just think of the kind of dedication people (still) put into Runescape. But the Neopets playerbase now is pretty much the same as it was back then (albeit dwindled a lot). Most people have been playing a looong time, and we're adults with jobs and kids. We no longer have the time, or indeed the energy, to work as hard as we used to on something that's supposed to be fun. The gaming market has evolved, too - mobile games reign supreme on the casual gaming scene, and that simple gameplay and achievable goals are what Neopets now has to compete with if it wants to keep its players - or Fyora willing, get new players.

Players leave, but very few new ones join, so the number of active players keeps declining. Among other problems, this means that anything valuable on a dead account - be it desirable pets or rare items - gets removed from the potential pool of circulation. So that old retired item you have your eye on will just keep getting rarer as the people who might sell it to you stop playing. Add to that the problem of wealthy players artificially driving up prices by buying and hoarding loads of valuable items, and the lack of money sinks that would remove NP from the player economy, and the site has a serious inflation issue.

How bad? Just between 2021 and 2023, the price of many desirable items increased 2-3 times, or more. People who spent years saving for an expensive stamp or powerful weapon found the object of their desire now selling for twice what it was just a few months ago. Once again: achievable goals are fun, impossible goals aren't.

TNT clearly saw this problem. And the way they're choosing to deal with it is at once extremely obvious and absolutely bonkers.

Give the People What They Want

One of the oldest recurring annual events on Neopets is the Advent Calendar, which runs for the entire month of December. Every day, users are treated to a short seasonal animation taking place somewhere in Neopia, along with a small sum of NP and 2-3 items. The prizes are different each day, and as a rule, those prizes are new items made specifically for the Advent Calendar, as opposed to preexisting items. Most prizes are junk that go straight into your safety deposit box, but it's still a popular site event - because who'd argue with free stuff and cute daily animations?

(The next few paragraphs have a number of links; first to Neopets itself, and then to Jellyneo, a major fansite. While most pages on Neopets require an account to view, this doesn't seem to be a problem for the ones I'm linking here.)

In December 2022, the Advent Calendar started as normal, but people quickly realized it was a bit... different. The animations were much simpler than past years. Rather than 10- to 30-second videos from recent previous years, we were instead treated to the likes of animated comic pages and short loops. This wasn't too surprising since 2021 had already started the trend of simpler animations. But some days didn't have animations at all, opting instead for mobile wallpapers or even printable coloring pages. This was well-received overall - the longer animations were starting to look pretty janky, so shor...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/lynndotpy on 2024-02-13 23:14:13.

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Xpost from another Halo sub, with some changes.

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If you know Halo fans, you know they're always pissed about the games.

The hatred towards 343 Industries for their releases are well documented. But you might be surprised to learn that controversies did not start with 343i's first release, Halo 4.

Nor did the hatred start with Halo: Reach for its armor abilities and retcons.

Nor did the hatred start with Halo 3 for its equipment and lcak of a PC release.

Nor did the hatred start with Halo 2 for its Arbiter missions, vehicle hijacking, and buggy, butt-cheek ridden PC release.

Nor did the hatred start with the release of the first game, Halo CE.

No, Halo was hated by Halo fans ever since Bungie left Apple to become a Microsoft exclusive.

This is the untold story of the origin of Halo gamer rage. One of a fanbase alienated, decades ago.

The story of Halo, the mysterious sequel to Marathon

The context: Bungie's devout followers were Mac gamers, excited to see the followup of Oni and Marathon. Halo was touted as a dramatic technological leap forward, hyped with ARGs and worldbuilding.

But before it was Halo, it was the untitled "Blam!" project. Scant leaks slipped through the lips of NDA-bound playtesters.

It was 1999 when Steve Jobs introduced Jason Jones to debut Halo at MacWorld.. Over the coming year, screenshots of a mysterious world with the best graphics people had ever seen would drop in increasing numbers, with scant lore drops, with promises of a technologically advanced simulated environment.

Being Halo fans, there was much lore speculation about Halo and how it might tie to Marathon.

You can see in the archives of halo.bungie.org how dedicated these fans were. There's analyses of quotes, theories trying to answer "who's that cyborg?", and, of course, the Cortana Letters.

The community was composed of ravenous, thriving, technical Mac gamers. This was a time when people had their own websites, running on their own servers, built by hand from HTML and CSS and gifs running on kilobyte modems. The computer was a shrine which connected people to an underground world of adherents.

It might be silly to think of now, but at the time, people were buying the best Mac desktops they could so they could run Halo, with their old computers running mail-servers and web-servers, if they were so lucky as to have DSL.

For many, Halo was the shining point of the optimism which encapsulated the coming year 2000. Un-fricking believable things were coming. This is how PC Gamer described it, October 1999:

The game is Halo and our first look at it blew our minds. It's set in a future in which the human race is on the run from a ruthless alien race called the Covenant. As billions perish on humanity's colonized planets, a human military unit decides to make a last stand on an ancient ring-shaped structure thousands of miles in diameter. The surface of this bizarre stellar body is a lush natural environment. It's on this "halo" that mankind will stage its greatest battle.

and

Halo has us on the edge of our seats. It might well be the next huge advance in multiplayer action games.

Of all the mysteries, there was exactly one thing people knew for certain: Halo for the Mac was going to revolutionize the real-time strategy genre.

Then, Bungie ruined Halo.

It started as as a string of pains and rumors. Myth wiping hard-drives, Bungie tight on cash, rumors about acquisitions, and all the while Microsoft was looking for something to make it feasible to make a name in the console space.

But the rumors were quickly confirmed.

To this day, this is still considered the darkest day for Mac gaming.

Announced June 19th, 2000, Microsoft bought Bungie and bought Halo to be an exclusive for their new console, the "X box".

The vitriol was voluminous. Kilobytes of gamer range spewed at Bungie from all directions. People felt they knew Bungie personally, and they felt betrayed.

Over 12 years later, Mac gamers would describe that day as "apocalyptic".

The IRC logs

To address the kilobytes of vitriol spewing at them across message boards, emails, and IRC, Bungie hosted a moderated Q&A on IRC. They opened the chat moments at a time to respond to questions.

The chatlog is here:

Give it a read. Takes range from skeptical to unhinged, unbridled anger. My favorite is Adezj, with their typo-ridden takes:

5:31 PM: Adezj -Why O Why didnt i take the blue pill and stayed in wonderland  
                    when Halo was going to be released on PC and Mac?!

Really, read the chatlogs. Keep in mind, this was the least vitriolic place people were

When Halo ultimately released on November 15th, 2001, it wasn't to longtime Bungie fans. The Halo fanbase that spawned from there was majority new players, who did not even know Halo was once an RTS for the Mac.

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TLDR: When Bungie sold to Microsoft, the excitement for Halo turned to the vitriolic gamer rage we know today. Halo fans have hated Halo since before Halo even had a name.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/error521 on 2024-02-12 17:45:36.

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With the heated political (and literal) climate that the world finds itself in these days, people more and more find themselves wanting to take up the role of an activist, and try to make a real difference in the world. This kind of thing always tends to come and go in waves, and the Trump administration definitely brought into full force. The pandemic only exemplified this, doubly so when the 2020 BLM protests kicked off and every company on the planet was pressured (...I guess?) into posting a black screen on Twitter and removing episodes of sitcoms that had vaguely satirical uses of blackface.

Before those protests eventually settled down once they achieved their ultimate goal of getting Cleveland's voice actor on Family Guy replaced, one company that decided to throw their hat into the activism ring was Epic Games, who decided to address it within their uber-popular multiplayer game, Fortnite. I'm sure anyone reading this has at least heard of Fortnite, but for those who only know it as "that thing all the kids are into these days", well, I'll give some context.

Fortnite is an enormously successful online...well, it's a lot of things, but nominally it's a "battle royale" third-person shooter where 100 players are dumped onto a map and have to gather weapons and loot to be the last one standing. It's got a fairly distinct, cartoony art-style, no real gore or blood, and all those darned Twitch streamers swarmed to it like flies, meaning it is enormously popular with kids and young teenagers in particular. Naturally, Epic has heavily captailzed on this by including things like popular dances (which has caused no small share of controversy) and crossovers with popular IPs - both trendy and vintage - like DC, Marvel, Star Wars, and Rick & Morty. So if you ever wanted to see, Darth Vader, Rick Sanchez, Catwoman, and Iron Man get into drive-bys while Eminem plays on the car radio, you know where to look. Besides GTA modding, anyway.

However, that doesn't do justice to just how much of an insane, surreal fever dream Fortnite actually is. The game radically changes every other week with new modes, weapons, features, and radical map changes. You can go away for a month and come back to a game with a completely overhauled map, new weapons, and about a million gameplay changes, most of which will, again, completely change within the next month. The game constantly gets new events, including ones with the aforementioned crossover IPs, but also weirder stuff like in-game screenings of movies (including screenings of the Christopher Nolan films Batman Begins, Inception, and The Prestige), digital concerts with artists like Marshmello, Ariana Grande, and Travis Scott, and occasionally splashy, promoted events where they find some elaborate justification for nuking the entire map. If you remember that "Metaverse" shit companies were hyped about a few years ago, Fortnite is arguably not far off from what they were trying to accomplish.

So, with the plans to broaden what Fortnite could really be and a want to help in some small way to improve society, Fortnite decided to make a big statement by...removing police cars from the game. Which...okay.

Anyway, after this truly monumental step, Epic decided they weren't done. They decided they were going to host a discussion viewable in-game, titled "We The People" starring Killer Mike of Run the Jewels fame and Van Jones, Jemele Hill and Elaine Welteroth of "I think I saw them on my Twitter timeline once" fame.

You can watch that here and putting aside all political opinions, it's really hard to ignore that this event was extremely dull, especially for the theoretical kids and pre-teens who would be watching it. It's such a dry, uneventful conversation, there's nothing to make it more interesting or interactive than just watching a YouTube video, and it's not at all presented in a way that would be easy for kids to understand or relate to. Do you really think the 10-year old who begged their mom to buy a Stormtrooper skin is gonna be deeply invested in the conversation about what percentage of products at retail should be from black owned businesses? But you did get an emote for signing in when it was on, so at least there's that.

Anyway, as you might expect, instead of sitting their white asses down and listening, players instead just literally threw tomatoes at the screen and spammed emotes and pings everywhere to disrupt the experience. You could get mad at them acting like a bunch of 12-year olds, but, well, most of them were probably literally 12. And I believe all that happened during the aforementioned movie screenings as well, so it wasn't exactly exclusive to this or something Epic couldn't have anticipated.

There was another event later in the month talking specifically about voter suppression that I can't find any footage of, which probably tells you about how much interest it gathered. Regardless it's clear that this whole approach needed a rethink, something more interactive, something easier for kids to get invested in. And one year later, Epic...tried a lot harder, I'll give them that.

So Martin Luther King Jr. Did civil rights, had a dream, not a fan of capitalism, got shot in the head by someone who may or may not have been working for the government. So, in August, out of the blue, the world was greeted with a Fortnite trailer elegantly titled "Celebrate MLK: TIME Studios Presents March Through Time in Fortnite". It's a trailer of these goofy cartoon characters walking through protests and a MLK museum while dramatic music and the "I have a dream" speech plays. It's almost impossible to take seriously, and as you might expect the general reaction was bafflement and disbelief.

Can you imagine a world where kids see MLK and are like "Oh yeah! that's the guy from Fortnite!"

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the amount of Victory Royales they have.

The Fortnite MLK event is going to reduce the amount of 12 year olds calling you racial slurs over mic by 27%.

He's turning in his grave so fast he could power a city

Pouring out my chug jug in solidarity

It should have been Malik instead, not only he was for armed resistance.. he was a camper too

the intent behind the Fortnite MLK event doesnt distract from the fact that i just had to type the words "the Fortnite MLK event"

That said, while it was largely met with mockery and derision, there were a few defenders. After all, despite how silly it may seem, maybe it could still be a great way to teach kids about race. So let's talk about the actual event itself.

As the title implied, the event seemed to largely be spawned by TIME Magazine apparently inspired from when they did a similar thing as a Virtual Reality experience, with some of Fortnite's community map makers being roped into it. It was also pushed by Epic in-game quite heavily, so they were clearly enthusiastic about the idea.

Whoever it was that was most involved, it was clear that they did genuinely learn a lot from Fortnite's last attempt to tackle racism - it's much more interactive and engaging. Instead of just watching a boring video, you explore a map filled with all sorts of historical landmarks, footage of MLK Jr. giving the speech, lots of little bits of information and trivia to read, plus quizzes and puzzles to complete. It felt like actually exploring an interactive museum instead of the equivalent of your teacher pulling up a YouTube video while she goes outside for a smoke.

Overall, while we can question if Fortnite is an appropriate platform for these kind of heavy topics, this event overall went over much better, and was considered a respectful and educational tribu - Nah, I'm kidding, it was a fucking mess.

The most obvious problem was that Fortnite is a game that has a lot of crossovers, both with real-life celebrities and fictional characters. And, shocker, a lot of those crossovers come off as hilariously out of place when contrasted with such a serious, real-life topic. Like, you ever thought you'd see Rick Sanchez and the Xenomorph solemnly reading about the civil rights movement?

Oh, and how about those emotes? Now, Epic had some foresight here, and disabled some of the ones that could most obviously used to be offensive like [facepalming and laughing emojis](https://www.reddit....

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-02-12 05:01:05.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Once again, a reminder to check out the Best Of winners for 2023!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

Hogwarts Legacy discussion is still banned.

Last week's Scuffles can be found here

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/deepvoicednerd on 2024-02-09 11:04:34.

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It was a sight that had never been seen before. Jaws hit the floor. People stopped in their tracks doing double takes. British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, a formidable, ruthless, emotionless, stone-cold woman did something that was almost unthinkable. She, get this, wait for it…showed some emotion!

It was in a London hotel lobby on the 13th of January 1982 and Thatcher was about to give a speech before the National Federation of Self-employed & Small Business when she tearfully told reporters “I am very concerned. My husband will arrive there this afternoon.”

So how did this come about? Why did the Iron Lady break down?

The answer was somewhere in the Sahara Desert.

Perhaps I should start this story from the beginning…

Everyone, meet Mark Thatcher.

Mark Thatcher is ah…umm…how can I put this politely?

A bit of a spoilt rich boy?

Proof that you don’t need a long neck and a beak to be a goose?

Dumber than a box of rocks? (And that’s probably an insult to a box of rocks)

Okay, okay, I’ll stick to the facts. Here goes…

Mark Thatcher is the only son of former British PM Margret and her husband Dennis Thatcher. Along with twin sister Carrol, Mark was born in 1953. He grew up to bail out of school and still somehow get offered a spot at Oxford University (his mother was the education secretary at the time. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…) which he then declined much to his father’s frustration before going on to fail his accountancy exam a grand total of three times.

Young Mark was a magnet for attracting trouble and making his mother’s life as Prime Minister as hard as possible (although to be fair Margret didn’t exactly endear herself to the British public either…). Mark’s questionable business dealings and friendships with Sultans were often brought to light in British Parliament. Even at the height of his mother’s rule, her own Tory Party frequently discussed ‘The Mark Problem’. When he asked his mother’s press secretary how he could help with her re-election campaign in 1987, the secretary told him to “leave the country”.

Now being a reasonably well-off young aristocrat and with a life of luxury seemingly handed to him on a platter, young Mark did indeed leave the country on multiple occasions for both business and pleasure. One of his biggest pleasures was of course, motor racing.

It all kicked off in 1979, shortly after his mother became British PM, when Mark started racing a little 1.6 litre Sunbeam in club events in the UK. So at least he started properly. Just start with a little car in a couple of small club events. A great way to learn the ropes. The important is to not do anything rash straight away and enter an incredibly difficult motor race…

Except he did. Barely 4 months after getting behind the wheel of a racing car for the first time, Thatcher lined up on the grid for the Bathurst 1000 in Australia, the toughest touring car race in the world.

“Oh dear” everyone went “A British aristocrat with barely any driving experience at Bathurst. This is going to be interesting…”

“Mummy had a sense of humour loss when I announced that I was going motor racing” he announced to the press before adding that “I’ve won couple of things, set a couple of lap records and also had one very nice crash!”

To the shock of many though, Mark did alright. From 54th on the grid, he was leading his class after 20 laps. Then the car broke on him and that was that.

“That’s motor racing but I’m glad I had the chance to run here” he told reporters.

Now in young Mark’s mind, his reasonable run at Bathurst may have convinced him, that he was a pretty damn good racing driver. I say that because the next year, 1980, he was on the grid at the Le Mans 24 Hour. (co-driving with Leila Lombardi, the only woman to have scored points in a Formula 1 race) And he was back again in 1981. He was a non-finisher both times but competing at Le Mans opened another door for Mark that would kick off a diplomatic incident and the subject of this post.

It was at the 1980 race, that a sponsor approached Mark about running in the Paris-Dakar Rally. The sponsor would be running 3 Peugeot 504’s in the 1982 event. Mark eagerly accepted. January 1982 was 18 months away. 18 months to prepare for what is arguably the most brutal, challenging and difficult motor race on the planet. Now go back and read the quote I put in the headline.

Oh boy…

So, what is the Paris-Dakar Rally?

The brainchild of French motorcycle racer Thierry Sabine, the event was created as part race, part adventure. Competitors, most of whom were enthusiastic amateurs with bikes, cars and trucks would have the opportunity of a lifetime. To race, to explore, to see the world! Sabine’s motto for the event was “A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind.”

It began in 1979 when competitors set out from the heart of Paris, headed south, ferried across to northern Africa and then charged south to the port of Dakar in Senegal. 3 weeks of intense rallying in some of the most picturesque albeit inhospitable terrains and places on earth. It didn’t take long for the professionals to join in. Belgian Le Mans legend Jackie Ickx was one of the first big name drivers in compete in 1981 and became a regular competitor.

From humble beginnings, the rally has changed a lot over the years. Unrest in northern Africa in 2008 forced the cancelation of the event. It moved to South America before more recently finding a home in Saudi Arabia. The Dakar, as it is simply known now is unrecognisable from what it started as but despite the growing professionalism of the teams and entrants, it remains an incredibly gruelling and difficult event. Simply finishing is an achievement in its own right.

For 1982, the Rally would leave Paris on New Year’s Day, travel south through France for 2 days, be ferried across to Algiers in Northern Algeria and then the rally would kick off in earnest, racing through Algeria, Mali and on to the west coast of Senegal where the finish line at the port of Dakar awaited.

Now when Mark agreed to enter the 1982 race in June 1980, he promptly forgot all about it until December 1981 when he was called about coming to Paris for the pre-event press conference. He has claimed that his co-driver called and reminded him 4 months after he signed up, but regardless, he did not treat the event with the reverence that it deserved. He thought it would be simple: drive through France, onto a ferry, get off a ferry, have a little jaunt through the Sahara and pop up in Dakar. To quote Jeremy Clarkson: “How hard can it be?”

Before the rally kicked off, Thatcher did a grand total of half a day of testing on New Year’s Eve. The rally started the next day.

Before things got underway, Mark arrogantly told reporters “I’ve now raced in Le Mans and other things. This rally is no problem.” (r/agedlikemilk would have a field day with this if Reddit was around in 1982)

Nevertheless, Mark drove out of Paris on the 1st of January as one of 382 competitors. With him in his Peugeot 504 was mechanic Jacky Garnier and co-driver Anne-Charlotte Verney. Verney was a highly skilled driver with multiple Le Mans starts to her name.

Things went fine at first. Mark made it onto the ferry to Africa with no problems and along with the rest of the competitors began the gruelling charge through the Sahara.

It’s hard to picture now, but just try to imagine being Anne-Charlotte Verney. You’re a highly skilled and respected racing driver and your co-driver is a playboy aristocrat who’s a few cents shy of a dollar. You’re driving through Algeria heading for Mali, in the Sahara Desert. Only the occasional marker to act as a checkpoint here and there. Scorching hot days and freezing nights. I do not envy that young lady.

Even Mark would admit later “We are in the desert on long, long stages, spending hours aiming at something very small on the horizon. This could all go very badly.”

On the 9th of January, close to the Algeria-Mali border, it did.

Thatcher’s Peugeot 504 was travelling in a convoy with the two sister team cars. It was a good idea. A lot of teams do this on Rallies like the Dakar. Your team cars all form up and basically daisy-chain their way through the rally. Teammates can travel in close company to render aid to each other if needed. Audi did this to great effect to win the recent 2024 Dakar.

According to Mark “We didn’t want to be driving like idiots. On the section between Tamanrasset and Timiaouine we were running in convoy. It was flat and fast and we were running on a track so you wouldn’t expect anything to go wrong. Except . . . we must have hit something.”

The Peugeot ground to a halt. The trailing arm links had both broken causing the rear axle to break away. Not exactly an easy fix. They were out.

The two teammate 504’s stopped and noted the location of their stranded teammate. As did several other competitors. Once they reached the end of the stage, they, being good teammates and competitors passed this information onto event organisers so Thatcher & Verney could be rescued. There was only one small, tiny, teeny-weeny, little problem with this.

They gave the wrong location.

According to Mark “the silly bastards - instead of telling everyone we were 25 miles east when they finished the section, they told them we were 25 miles west."

Oops…

Now if this happened in the Dak...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/avematerlibertas on 2024-02-05 20:38:48.

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Peace be upon the Ant, not so much between its creators and its publisher.

TL, DR ants that really love Jesus, man. Like, a lot.

Hello once again, r/HobbyDrama! Previously, I brought you an account about some Brazilian religious propaganda made for kids and how it became part of a wider Internet/meme culture. While Dudão may have failed its primary objective of becoming a Christian substitute to secular children’s media, today’s theme is an entire beast of its own.

In this post, we will explore another iconic Brazilian religious character, Smilinguido (and friends), his origins and circumstances of creation, his wider cultural impact and its current state. We are going to assess how Smilinguido triumphed where Dudão met its stump, and how much of a unique phenomenon it was at its height.

As in the last post, all sources will be in Portuguese (the language barrier may be challenging; however, it's worth the read for a deeper look into the broader scene of Brazilian Christian children’s media).

This post is highly indebted to the extensive research conducted by Prof. Doc. Karina Kosicki Bellotti in her PhD thesis, “Delas é o Reino dos Céus”: Mídia evangélica infantil na cultura pós-moderna do Brasil (Anos 1950 a 2000) [For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven: evangelical children’s media in the post-modern culture of Brazil - 1950’s to 2000’s], and the interview given to Redomacast, episode 52 , by Smilinguido’s co-creator, Márcia Macedo D’Haese. Other sources will be credited at the end, in the bibliography section.

Also, it should be noted that most of the materials (comics, books, illustrated Bibles, and so on), are kind of a lost media. There aren’t many scans available online, so I’ll heavily rely upon physical copies and second-hand resellers for this research.

To understand Smilinguido and his origins, we must turn back in time, and set the context in which he was born; the progressive stages in which he would develop, change and grow. Only after that, I believe we will have enough baggage to approach the media itself. (I’ll probably divide this post in two parts, in order to better assess all the topics here discussed and analysed, so please, bear this one with me.)

VERY VEEEEEERY ABRIDGED HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Brazil, 1970s to 80s. The country is in the turbulent process of social transformations. The military government censors and controls much of the media vehicles, and processes of industrial, urban and communications development kickstarted in the 50s begin to take a more solid shape. National and foreign intermingle through cultural and religious exchange. Paradoxically, the military regime would decrease regulations and allow individual faith expressions, although monitored and at times persecuted.

The decade would also become important in the slow shift of Brazilian Protestantism, skewing from traditional hierarchical churches of various European and American Diasporas, towards Pentecostal, Revivalist and Fundamentalist movements (much of due to American missionary initiatives, the fatigue of traditional religions and the decline of Catholicism). The period highlighted a rift, between churches that promoted individualistic, material solutions for immediate earthly problems, and churches working towards ecumenical, inter-religious and inter-denominational dialogues (BELLOTTI, 2007, p.151).

It is in this scenario of change, shifts in religious demographics and global cultural interactions that Smilinguido would come to life.

IN THE BEGGINING THERE WAS AN ANT: THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA

According to Márcia Macedo D’Haese, visual artist responsible for the creation of the iconic ant, the initiative was brought forth after her husband ,Hialmar, gave a lecture on technology and faith to a youth group of the Igreja Evangélica do Cristianismo Decidido (Evangelical Church of the Decisive Christianity), in 1979. Bear in mind, this was a small local church, situated in Southern Brazil and associated with a German pietist missionary group (being part of those traditionally European Diaspora majority churches). It didn’t have the same sway and reach as larger denominations, neither did it hold the same amount of influence and capital as its concurrent emerging media-driven evangelists.

Hialmar defended that instead of generalizing and condemning television, radio, etc. as an evil instrument, Christians should be the ones responsible for making media work for the good (BELLOTTI, 2007, p.148). It was with this goal that, later in 1980, both Márcia, Hialmar, and some of the churches’ youths would establish Arvicris, Artes Visuais Cristãs (Christian Visual Arts).

The company became an independent entity to the church, although they provided it with the workspace and with donations.

THE ANTS ARE A PEOPLE NOT STRONG: THE ARVICRIS PERIOD (1980-1997)

In the beginning, the Ant was with form, but void of name.

Márcia D’Haese would constantly sketch and decorate her notebooks with the distinctive figure of an anthropomorphic ant, drawing the attention of her colleagues. She had already used the animal to illustrate various non-denominational Christian publications since the late 70s, without naming it or giving any character development. The animal soon became part of the company’s identity, describing themselves as “little ants, small and fragile, but very much excited and determined not only to criticize, but also to present a healthy message to the Brazilian people” (BELLOTTI, 2007, p.152).

At first, the Ant had the placeholder's name of Zecão (something akin to Big Joe). However, they changed it due to Hialmar’s affirmation that the company shouldn’t use poor quality materials, all “esmilingüido” (variation of desmilinguido, informal Brazilian Portuguese expression for something weak, crumbled). The members of Arvicris thought that the name sounded funny, and so Smilinguido came to be.

Carlos Tadeu Grzybowski, who signed as the first script writer for the ant, took great inspiration in the philosophy of storytelling adopted by C.S. Lewis. He prioritised stories instead of explicit religious or doctrinal messages, with biblical parallelisms and symbols, anthropomorphic representations and parable-like tales. “The message must be transmitted through situations and experiences rather than moral lessons and rules” (BELLOTTI, 2007, p. 180) instead of presenting easy answers and underestimating a child's capability of absorbing concepts. The materials were made less focused on reaching out for new converts, aiming instead to become a Christian supplement to children’s education.

Smilinguido’s personality and traits began taking form as Avicris’ products became more diverse. At first, production was limited to audiovisual slides with accompanying cassettes targeted at churches and Sunday schools. Smilinguido would illustrate bookmarkers given at the end of each lesson, with a Bible verse and the core message taught at the presentation.

Later on, as the company was able to produce and increase its distribution, so would its catalogue of licensed works, illustrating bookmarkers,t-shirts, key chains, bottoms, and much more. As such, Smilinguido would slowly depart from the supporting role as an accompanying drawing for biblical paraphrases and acquire his own identity.

Smilinguido and friends evolved from the desire to make a Brazilian Christian character that, well, was genuinely Brazilian. The cast embraced the regional varieties one can see all over the country, the richness of its natural environments and the proposal of reaching out to everyone and anyone by incorporating this colourful ensemble of characters.

For the duration of the 1980s and early 1990s, Arvicris would gain notoriety with the little ant and its many licensed products. The fame, nevertheless, made the company face an uncomfortable dilemma: how to preserve the original purpose of Smilinguido as an evangelistic vehicle and avoid it becoming another product of mass m...

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I discovered this subreddit through some posts related to V8 Supercars and the Bathurst 1000 - particularly the outstanding write up about WPS Racing by u/deepvoicednerd. While the V8s are the national racing series of Australia, they aren't the only event that occurs on Mount Panorama each year - and at risk of losing my Australian credibility, they aren't my favourite, either. This race hasn't produced the outright hate that the 1000 has between fans (and sometimes drivers), but it has produced drama of the highest order in the "heart pounding" sense.

Allow me to introduce you to the Bathurst 12 Hour.

This race is so named because... well, it's at Bathurst, and it lasts twelve hours, usually beginning at around 5:45am (the warm-up lap is included in the race time, so while the timer starts then, the actual race starts shortly after) and finishing 12 hours after at 5:45pm. That's one of the big differences; the other is the cars. While the 1000 is run as part of the V8 Supercars championship, the 12 Hour is a race intended for GT machinery such as these. In pretty much every other 12 Hour, teams have filled their lineups with a mix of V8 Supercar drivers who know the track and international guns who know the cars. Except...

Preliminary Drama - The Cold War (aka A Brief History Of The 12 Hour Pre-2015)

The Bathurst 12 Hour, which was originally an event run in the early 1990s, returned in 2007 as a production car based race. For four years it remained this way, attracting a significant entry list of cars you'd see on the street - think BMWs, Mitsubishi Lancers, and Subarus - but not a significant following.

For the 2011 running, the decision was made to allow purpose-built racing cars - specifically GT3s - into the race. This cut the entry list almost in half, as most production teams felt they had been wronged by this, but there was clearly demand, as several local teams entered their GT - as did Audi's de facto factory team, Joest. Joest promptly wiped the floor with the locals, finishing first and second, and then the next year, Audi's other de facto factory team Phoenix won again, although they did not finish 1-2 as the second of the team cars crashed in horrific conditions at around midday.

However, Audi didn't dominate this time - a Mercedes finished within 15 seconds of the winner - and by now, other teams had woken up to this race; a combination of slightly looser entry rules and this recognition saw the grid for 2013 double. This time, the Erebus Mercedes that came close in 2012 won - more on Erebus later - and the event continued to progress in 2014, where a Ferrari crewed by the likes of F1 alumni Mika Salo and V8 Supercars legend Craig Lowndes won.

However, for this race, Lowndes wouldn't be involved. Not that he didn't want to; but Supercars had other ideas.

You see, by now, Supercars management had noticed that there was this other race at Bathurst that was quickly gaining popularity and might be threatening their big event at Bathurst at the other end of the year. How did they respond? To reference the outstanding work of u/deepvoicednerd again, they uncorked their inner Ivan Stibbard and scheduled an official testing session on the same weekend as the 12 Hour. This was a compulsory session for all drivers. Thusly, they could not be at Bathurst.

For the part of the 12 Hour, and owner Yeehah Events, their strategy in response was... ignoring it. The 12 Hour proceeded as usual, with nothing being discussed about Supercars - except by TV commentators filling in the fans at home, and by Nissan executives, who pulled off a Mission Impossible-style photoshoot of their Supercar and GT3 car together.

In the long run, Supercars decided to do the next most obvious thing - they bought out Yeehah, and there was never another split between the two events' management. But for 2015, that meant that the grid was filled with either internationals or second-tier Aussies. Speaking of which, let's meet the players in this race...

A Who's Who Of The Mountain On 8 February 2015

The polesitting team was one we'd discussed before - Phoenix Racing. The 2012 winners were back with two cars for this Bathurst, and both would play roles. In the #15, entered into the AP class for combinations including one unseeded driver, were GT ace Laurens Vanthoor, GT prospect Marco Mapelli, and former F1 driver Markus Winkelhock.

(I should explain seeded and unseeded drivers. Seeded drivers are those such as Winkelhock, who have a gold or platinum racing licence granted by the FIA. Unseeded drivers are those with a silver or bronze licence. This was designed to force all cars to have at least one amateur driver in them, but some teams found loopholes; for example, Mapelli, despite being a professional, had only a silver licence and thusly was counted as the unseeded, or "amateur", driver for the #15.)

Across the garage was the #16, which had a cool crocodile livery and was driven by 1998 Le Mans 24 Hours winner Stephane Ortelli, Audi factory driver Christopher Haase... and their unseeded driver was Felix Baumgartner. Yes, the BASE jumper. What can I say but the mountain brings out thrill seekers?

Starting alongside them was a BIG surprise. Roger Lago was, and I believe still is, a businessman from Brisbane, Queensland who ran cold stores as his day job, and then raced a Lamborghini on his weekends. Nobody fancied that Lamborghini, especially given it was an entirely local based driving squad - alongside Lago was David Russell, who drove in second-tier local series Carrera Cup, and Steve Owen, who wasn't considered good enough for a seat in Supercars; but here they were starting second out of everyone.

Then came the Nissan in third. This was also the polesitter for the AA class, which was allowed just one seeded driver, which for Nissan was Japanese ace Katsumasa Chiyo, who had starred in 2014 but also been involved in a massive crash at the top of the mountain that destroyed both his car and the Clearwater Ferrari. And then crashed again in practice this year, almost ending their chances before the race had begun. He was joined this time by two video gamers. Both Wolfgang Reip and late addition Florian Strauss (substituting for Nissan's other GT ace Alex Buncombe, whose wife had just given birth to their first child) had won competitions on Gran Turismo and then, supported by Nissan, worked their way up to be here. The Nissan was one of the fan favourites.

Starting fourth was an AF Corse Ferrari. AF Corse, for context, won the most recent 24 Hours of Le Mans and are one of the best GT teams of all time. So they would always be a threat for the win regardless of who was driving, which in this case was factory drivers Michele Rugolo and Davide Rigon, as well as mining magnate Steve Wyatt.

It'd take me ten hours to continue through the rest of the grid in such depth, so instead here is a bullet point list of key players who will play a part during this article:

• Craft-Bamboo Racing had two Aston Martins; the #99 was a poisoned chalice all weekend and will not be mentioned much, but the #97 of Alex McDowall, Stefan Mucke, and former 12 Hour-winning amateur Darryl O'Young started fifth
• The aforementioned Clearwater Racing brought back team owner Mok Weng Sun and Irishman Matt Griffin, and added GT superstar Toni Vilander. They were sixth on the grid
• Seventh was Erebus Motorsport's first Mercedes; Erebus were the official Australian Mercedes team back in 2015 as opposed to being a future r/HobbyDrama article. This car had veteran Dean Canto, who might remind you of certain famous characters, alongside youngsters Jack LeBrocq and Richard Muscat; the other car, which started 19th, had Simon Hodge (the holder of the unrestricted Bathurst lap record), Nathan Morcom and 16-year-old Austin Cindric.
• Finally, in ninth was the Bentley. There were three this year, but the one that matters is the #10. This featured Le Mans winner Guy Smith, as well as Bentley factory driver Steven Kane, and Matt Bell. Remember the name Matt Bell.

There's other characters in this race - there are four other classes, all filled with drivers deserving to be there - but I will mention them as they come up.

The Early Running (And Even Before)

Bathurst is a brutal place. So often, we see cars with so much promise not even make the start. You may have noticed that I didn't describe any of the contenders as the reigning champions. That's because, on Friday, Tony d'Alberto had a massive stack in the #88 Maranello Ferrari, eliminating t...

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Reminder that we have the Best Of winners for 2023!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

Hogwarts Legacy discussion is still banned.

Last week's Scuffles can be found here

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/diamondsandglass on 2024-02-05 06:14:06.

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I’ll try to keep this post shorter than my previous ballet drama summaries. Also I'm not on mobile for once! So any formatting issues are entirely my own fault.

This happened fairly recently, and yet lots of people have already forgotten it. In the heady days of 2022 though it was big news in ballet.

What is the Bolshoi?

The Bolshoi Ballet is a ballet company located in Moscow founded in 1776. It was frequented by the Russian nobility and upper crust, but importantly was not directly sponsored by the tsar. This has made it more stable than the Marinsky, which as an imperial theater has struggled to find its footing through the 20th and 21st centuries. Bolshoi

Who is Olga Smirnova?

Olga Smirnova has been a professional ballet dancer since 2011, and a prima ballerina (the highest rank) since 2018. She studied at Vaganova Academy, the leading ballet school in Russia, from which most Bolshoi dancers are directly hired. Such was the case with Smirnova, who started as a soloist (second highest rank overall) skipping an apprenticeship or the corps de ballet, where most dancers start. Clearly, someone high up considered her a star in the making. She would prove them right, not only headling at the Bolshoi, but also doing guest appearances in other countries, including American Ballet Theatre.

A quick recap of why no one wants to live in Russia

I’m sure most people don’t need to be reminded of this, but there is a war going on in Russia right now. One they are losing! The current president/lifelong god king of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is obsessed with expanding the borders of the country. A notable example is the 2012 invasion of Crimea, which is currently still a Russian territory. He had been menacing Ukraine for well over a decade before invading in spring of 2022.It was supposed to be a quick and easy takeover, knocking out the Ukrainian government and gaining a new Russian territory, but it turned out not to be that simple. The world closed ranks to support Ukraine, providing arms, accepting refugees, and more than anything endless morale support. Russia is almost universally hated right now, and those that can afford to have moved abroad and distanced themselves from their home country. This includes ballerinas.

March 16, 2022

Smirnova makes an announcement. She is leaving the Bolshoi Ballet and defecting from Russia altogether in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. She had already expressed dissent online and through social media, but this announcement shook the ballet world. Smirnova was far from the first person to defect from Bolshoi, ballet was often the only way out of the constrictive Soviet Union in the 20th century, however she was the first notable dancer to do so over the current crisis. She also made it very clear that this was a moral decision, and that were it not for the invasion she would have stayed at home in Russia.It’s important to note that Smirnova was in a privileged position when she made the decision to defect. As a prima ballerina at a (if not the) top ballet company, she was at the absolute top of the ballet world. She could have had a job at any company she preferred, or even started freelancing and traveling around the world. She was able to negotiate a position at the Dutch National Ballet before even announcing her departure from Bolshoi. It’s possible others may have followed her, but were scared for their livelihoods or even their lives. Russian ballet has a history of dramatic and even violent power struggles, something I plan to write about further in future. I also specifically want to write a post about ballet and defection, so look out for that if you’re interested.

Additional Reading

You can find Smirnova’s website, including an in-depth a recap of her career, here- https://www.olgasmirnovaballet.com/about#:~:text=Immediately%20upon%20graduating%20from%20the,the%20Bolshoi%20Theatre%20in%202016.And here are links to some articles I read covering her defection at the time-

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/JarJarBrinksSecurity on 2024-02-04 22:53:58.

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WWE is no stranger to controversy. Currently, Vince McMahon is being investigated by the Federal Government under sex trafficking charges (and civilly sued for many years of SA, among other things), the steroid trials in the early 90s, and negligence leading to the death of wrestler Owen Hart. There’s also less serious things like their decade long mission to push Roman Reigns as the face of the company despite fan backlash, the current story of The Rock returning to fight Roman Reigns and nixing a year long story build for Cody Rhodes, and many other examples that deserve their own things. But this ongoing drama reminded me of a couple years ago when WWE created a new match for women and named it after The Fabulous Moolah.

The Match

In 2014, WWE created a match to take place at WrestleMania called the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal. In this match, 30 men start in the ring and try to throw each other out of the ring over the top rope. If you are thrown out over the top rope and your feet touch the floor, you are eliminated from the match. It has the same rules as another one of WWE’s big matches, the Royal Rumble. But unlike the Royal Rumble where the winner receives a title shot at WrestleMania, the only thing you get for winning this one is the honor to hold the trophy. It was mostly designed to get talent, who didn’t have a match at WrestleMania , onto the show. It was never really seen as a big match by fans and was just a nice thing on the Pre-Show.

4 years later in 2018, WWE announced that they were creating another Battle Royal, this time for the Women’s Wrestlers. A Women’s Battle Royal had taken place before at WrestleMania in 2009, but that one was won by Santino Marella, a comedy wrestler that was dressed as his “twin sister” Santina Marella. That’s a whole thing for another day. But just like the Men’s BR honoring the legend Andre the Giant, WWE announced the Women’s BR would be honoring Wrestling legend The Fabulous Moolah. And fans were pissed.

Who is The Fabulous Moolah?

Mary Lillian Ellison was a wrestler famously known as The Fabulous Moolah. She started wrestling in 1949 after her divorce and in just 7 years, she became a recognizable name in wrestling. She won the NWA championship in 1956 and although there was some internal trouble with higher ups who wouldn’t recognize her reign, she held onto the title for 10 years and would hold it for another 10 years starting in 1968. Other accolades include a 4 time WWE Women’s champ, 2 time NWA Women’s Tag Champ, and would even have 2 more championship reigns in NWA, one of which she held for 5 years. She was also the first woman allowed to wrestle at Madison Square Garden and helped overturn the ban on Women’s Wrestling in New York. In 1995, she was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, the first woman to do so, and even came back in 1999 to wrestle until her death in 2007 at 84. A very legendary career that many are jealous of.

Enough of the praising, let’s get to why people hate her.

On March 12, 2018 during Monday Night Raw, the Fabulous Moolah Women’s Battle Royal was announced and fans immediately voiced their outrage online. There are many threads on /r/SquaredCircle, but I think this thread explains it well. I’m going to summarize it but I encourage you to read the original post as it goes into more detail.

• Moolah started a wrestling school where she trained women. Except she didn’t. She accepted their money and offloaded them to other wrestlers who she didn’t pay for the training.
• While you trained at her school, she required you to sign a contract that gave her the position of your booker and she took 25% of your pay. Some wrestlers stated that she took 30% of their fee and she would deduct travel expenses, food, rent, and utilities before paying them. This resulted in one woman, Debbie Johnson, not being paid a cent for two years.
• You were required to rent apartments that she owned on her property and you would pay her for rent and utilities.
• The wrestling training took place in a barn that lacked heating and air conditioning and would be 5 hours a day for 6 months.
• If you angered her during training, she would refuse to book them.
• Some women were monitored and barred from leaving the training camp unless accompanied.
• Many wrestlers accused her of using her influence to control the women’s wrestling scene to make sure they didn’t gain as much recognition as her.

And here’s where shit gets really bad. Trigger warning for sexual assault of all kinds.

Since her death, many women have come forward and told their stories of Moolah being their pimp. She would often give her trainees to promoters without their prior knowledge. One woman, Sweet Georgia Brown, told her daughter that she was “often raped, given drugs, and made an addict in an intentional attempt” by The Fabulous Moolah and her husband Buddy Lee who wanted to control her.

Legendary Women’s Wrestler Luna Vachon claimed that Moolah forced her to be photographed by an older man while she was 16. She had also claimed that her aunt had seen Moolah having sex with her trainees. Sandy Parker, who is gay, claimed Moolah pressured her to date men and forbade her from going to gay bars.

Here is another thread where /u/PurpleGato42 typed up a very long post on her demonic behavior with videos, interviews, and many sources.

So yeah, fans were right to be upset at this move.

The Reaction

The announcement thread is a mix of jokes and well deserved outrage. My personal favorites are the top 2 comments which read “Can’t wait for the Chris Benoit memorial ladder match” and “The Ultimate Warrior humanitarian award” (which is unfortunately very real). Some wrestling news outlets posted articles containing reactions on twitter such as Fightful. But if there was one thing WWE was good at, it was ignoring their fanbase and waiting for them to run out of steam. And unfortunately for them, fans were more passionate about this issue than they assumed.

Almost immediately, Deadspin and Newsweek picked up the controversy bringing the story out of the wrestling sphere and to a wider audience, which I’m sure WWE didn’t want.

And /u/daflash00 made a post that discussed a different plan of action. Contact the sponsors. Wrestlemania that year was sponsored by Snickers and KFC. Many examples of templates were put throughout the thread to help others and to dissuade harassment of the sponsor’s employees. /u/NeoGeoMeow commented about their experience calling Mars customer support and they were told that Snickers was aware and they were waiting for an official response and that they were taking it seriously.

And 3 days later, WrestlingInc posted an article with an official response from Mars Wrigley. They told them

We were recently made aware of the World Wrestling Entertainment Inc's (WWE) decision to honor a former wrestler during the upcoming WrestleMania 34 event. As a principle-based business that has long championed creating inclusive environments that encourage and empower everyone to reach their full potential, this is unacceptable. We are engaging with the WWE to express our disappointment.

WWE were pros at many things, ignoring fan response being one of them. But ignoring sponsors was another thing.

The Aftermath

2 days later, a statement was released where WWE caved to sponsor pressure and removed Moolah’s name from the match now just being called “WrestleMania Women’s Battle Royal”. Stephanie McMahon, daughter of Vince McMahon and now-former CBO of WWE, sent out a tweet where she acknowledged the controversy and announced the name change.

What now?

As we all know, in 2020, COVID hit. WrestleMania was moved from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa to the WWE Performance Center in Orlando and both the Men’s and Women’s Battle Royals were cancelled so they could limit the number of wrestlers in the ring at one time. After WWE resumed normal operations, the men’s BR came back and moved to the Smackdown before WrestleMania, but the women’s has been quietly shelved after only 2 matches.

Moolah has become sort of persona non grata in WWE since the whole thing and rarely gets mentioned, if at all, anymore. There w...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/DeepFake369 on 2024-01-31 18:33:43.

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This write-up was inspired by u/MisterBadGuy159’s Yu-Gi-Oh write-ups, particularly their write-up about the history of Firewall Dragon, the Link Monster that got everything around it banned. This is my first write-up here, so bear with me, and please don’t hesitate to tell me if you notice any mistakes or if anything is unclear; I only started playing Yu-Gi-Oh at the tail end of the period I’m covering, so nearly everything I know about it is through independent research.

For now, though, it’s time to talk about Mystic Mine, one of the most controversial Yu-Gi-Oh cards ever printed.

It's Time For Your I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-Introduction!

First, some context. In case you’re unaware of what Yu-Gi-Oh is, it’s a trading card game: namely, a de-fictionalized version of the card game from the manga of the same name, and one whose popularity competes with Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering. The goal for each player is to either reduce their opponent’s Life Points (functionally, their health) to 0 or render them unable to draw any cards. To do this, players summon monsters to their side of the field, as well as play Spell Cards and Trap Cards to supplement those monsters: the former can usually be played right away, while the latter must usually remain face-down on the field for a turn before being used. (Naturally, the game is a lot more complex than that, but most of it’s irrelevant to the topic at hand, so I won’t go into depth on the rules here.) Furthermore, Yu-Gi-Oh is split into two different regions, each with a different banlist and certain exclusive cards: the Original Card Game (labeled as the OCG from here on out) covering Japan, China, South Korea, and other nearby countries (and often getting new cards first), and the Trading Card Game (labeled as the TCG from here on out) encompassing everywhere else. (For reference, this drama takes place in the TCG format.)

One of the key differences between Yu-Gi-Oh and many similar card games is that the game does not utilize a hard resource system, such as Magic: The Gathering’s mana or Pokémon’s energy cards. The only resources players need to worry about are the cards themselves, which often have no restrictions other than only being able to have their effects used “once per turn.” As you might expect, this means the game plan of most decks is to get as many good cards on the field as quickly as possible, and the rate players can do this has only escalated as power creep took hold of the game.

However, while the combo-oriented nature of Yu-Gi-Oh has led to its fair share of drama over the years, that’s not the side of the game we’ll be focusing on today.

Nope, today we’ll be focusing on a deck that strove to do the exact opposite of combo.

The Fields of Change

One of the unique mechanics of Yu-Gi-Oh’s playing field is the Field Zone, which is used to play specific spells known as Field Spells, which stay on the field until they’re either destroyed by a card effect or replaced by another Field Spell. Initially, there was only one for both players to share, but Master Rule 3, implemented in 2014, changed the field so that each player had their own Field Zone, meaning both players could control a Field Spell at the same time.

For a long time, this didn’t mean very much, because most early Field Spells were… not very good, to say the least. However, starting in approximately late 2016 with the release of Union Hangar, the number of powerful Field Spells in the game began to increase dramatically. Many of these new Field Spells simply allowed the player to search one of their archetype’s monsters when it was played, which made getting the cards needed to start powerful combos much easier. At the time, this often came packaged with a bonus effect, such as SPYRAL Resort granting its archetype’s cards protection from targeted effects, or Trickstar Light Stage preventing your opponent from activating a face-down Spell or Trap Card once per turn.

However, just because a Field Spell doesn’t allow you to search a card doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t powerful. Some Field Spells instead have floodgate effects, which is an umbrella term to describe an effect that attempts to prevent the other player from playing the game the way they want to. These were less common, but many of them led to quite a bit of frustration whenever they hit the field. Domain of the True Monarchs required a deck to be built around it but could lock many decks out of summoning their best monsters with ease. Necrovalley could lock decks reliant on the Graveyard out of the game entirely as long as it stuck around. Secret Village of the Spellcasters made both itself and the Spellcaster monsters enforcing its effect difficult to remove from the field and invalidated a full third of the card pool for anyone playing against it. All of these cards could potentially win games on their own, and all of them were the subject of their fair share of ire whenever they became relevant.

But none of that compares to the sheer hatred that was directed at Mystic Mine.

Unleashing the Monster (Underminer)

Allow me to set the stage. It’s May 2019. Players have settled into what is now known as TOSS Format, one of the most well-loved formats of the modern era. Yu-Gi-Oh’s disastrous 2018, one filled with absurd combo decks and ludicrously broken new monsters, has finally been put behind it. While remnants of its power still linger, the game is in as good a place as it’s been since Link Monsters were introduced back in 2017.

Then, Konami releases the set Dark Neostorm in the TCG, consisting of one hundred entirely new cards. As expected, the vast majority of them go on to do nothing. However, a precious few of them are good enough to enter the competitive scene immediately. One of these cards is the Field Spell Mystic Mine, also known as Spell-Mining Cave in the OCG.

Mystic Mine had two effects. The first was a floodgate that could affect both players, preventing the player who controlled more monsters from activating monster effects or attacking. Its second effect caused it to destroy itself at the end of each turn if both players controlled the same number of monsters.

Players were nervous as soon as they saw this card. As you might expect, just about any deck that uses monsters requires those monsters to be able to attack to win, meaning Mystic Mine seemed capable of putting any strategy on hold as soon as it hit the field. Furthermore, almost all of the best cards used to handle problematic Spell and Trap Cards at the time, such as Knightmare Phoenix, Knightmare Unicorn, and Tornado Dragon, were monsters, meaning that Mystic Mine rendered all of them functionally useless. As a result, players knew, or at least suspected, that Mystic Mine was about to change the game as soon as it was released: they just didn’t know how much.

All those fears would soon be confirmed: to say Mystic Mine had a monumental impact on the game was an understatement.

You Are Now Entering the Mines

The majority of Yu-Gi-Oh cards see competitive play rarely, if ever. Even amongst those that do, many of them only see play in certain types of decks. For instance, Cynet Mining, a powerful Spell Card that was also introduced to the game in Dark Neostorm, only saw competitive play in decks utilizing the Cyberse monsters it could search. However, Mystic Mine had no such restrictions, and it made its presence known in a hurry.

Mystic Mine’s first appearance in a topping deck was piloted by Joshua Oosters, who utilized the card in a Sky Striker deck just three days after Dark Neostorm was released in Europe to win the Netherlands National Championship. Mystic Mine would swiftly become a mainstay in Sky Striker strategies; not only did they rarely control more than one monster at a time, making it unlikely Mystic Mine would ever impact them, but their goal was already to control the field with their archetypal Spell Cards, which synergized quite well with Mystic M...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RemnantEvil on 2024-01-31 08:28:23.

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Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing game by FromSoftware, famous for their “Soulsborne” series of games that began with Demon’s Souls and continued through the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne (hence the portmanteau), and Sekiro. Outside of a loose lore connection between the Dark Souls games, the games are all standalone experiences and, while Easter eggs are common, you really don’t need to have played any to play any other.

Among the shared elements, there are probably three that highlight the range of Easter eggs. One is the “common element”, for instance, many of the games feature a “crestfallen” character right near the start of the game, who will give the player an item and express their own state of despair. Another is the reference character – many of the games feature a character named Patches, whose presence does not seem to indicate any shared continuity, but he simply shows up in a lot of games with a similar appearance and mannerisms. And lastly, the reference item – the most famous being the Moonlight Greatsword, which appears in every game, even as far back as King’s Field, the Demon’s Souls predecessor.

I will assume a base level of knowledge about video games – leveling up, etc. – but there are a few specifics to the Soulsborne game that are story relevant.

The grind is real.

Soulsbornes use a type of currency that varies in name, but since Demon’s Souls popularized the term “souls”, many players keep the language through later games, even if the terminology changes. (Elden Ring uses “runes” in place of souls.)

Souls are your currency for literally everything. To level up, you rest at a bonfire and spend the required amount of souls to move up to the next level in whatever attribute you choose. Want the sword being sold by a merchant? Souls. Want to upgrade it later? Souls. (And some materials too… which you can buy with souls.)

Where do souls come from? You can find them around the world in chests and such, but mainly kills. The smaller and weaker foes naturally give few, bosses give the most, with maybe 120 from a basic undead soldier and as many as 10,000 from a boss. And as you level up, it progressively costs more to level each time, so each advancement means a higher cost to continue improving.

I believe each game has been beaten as “soul level one”, i.e. a player can complete the game without leveling up their character at all. (Gear does not count.) The misnomer that you have to “get good” at Dark Souls is just a community meme; you can actually beat the game without getting good, you just have to get strong by climbing progressively higher steps to compensate for lack of ability with increased character attributes. There’s one area of the game where you can venture out, kill four unique enemies, then return to the bonfire, and each trip nets you about 10,000 souls – early on, enough for four or five levels.

There are several quirks that complicate souls. One is that if you die, you leave all the souls you’ve collected at the place you died. In the case of a boss arena, yeah, that means you have to go back in there to get them, and you won’t usually be able to leave unless you’ve killed the boss. Secondly, when you die, you return to the last bonfire you rested at. This further complicates things as it also repopulates the area with any enemies that had died (which occurs any time you rest at the bonfire, hence why the above souls farming circuit is possible). To get your souls back, you may be risking an encounter with whatever killed you in the first place. Running is a viable strategy, but you are balancing the heightened risk of being killed on the way with the greater reward of avoiding fights.

And lastly, if you die before you retrieve your souls, they are lost forever. This makes the time after defeating a boss, when your cup overfloweth with souls, potentially the riskiest, as you have to get somewhere safe to spend those souls.

Though there’s variation in the games, this is the core premise of the currency system, and it’s true to Elden Ring.

Help a brother out.

An unusual aspect of Soulsborne titles, that would gradually be sanded down over time, was the lack of clarity about many things, but particularly multiplayer. Rather than being a menu item you select, multiplayer is actioned through the game world itself. The clearest example of what it’s like is in Dark Souls, so I’ll use that again to demonstrate.

At a certain point in Dark Souls, a character will give you an item called the White Sign Soapstone. With this, you can enable yourself to be summoned by another player into their world (in the lore, it’s treated as kind of parallel universes, sort of) by using the soapstone to write a little sign on the ground. If another player finds your sign, they can click it to summon you, and you’ll appear as a white phantom – you can die, of course, so not a real apparition – to help them clear an area up until and including a boss.

There are some quirks to this system:

1. There are servers but you’ll be on a server without knowing which, and you’ll gradually cycle over time. What this means is, if you want to play with a friend, good luck – you need to put your sign down somewhere obscure so other players won’t summon you, and then you’ll need to wait until your friend cycles to the same server as you and your sign appears for them.
2. Even if your friend does summon you, there is no in-game chat. A common solution was to use a phone or a messenger app to open a separate voice channel, but the game itself lacked one. Players could gesture in the game from a selection of motions, such as pointing, and could throw little blocks that would say a word, like “Thank you!” The developers were so strict about this, you could not use Xbox Live’s chat function at all. If you tried to use private chat, it would kick you back to the main menu – even if the person you were speaking to wasn’t even playing Dark Souls!
3. Health was not shared, but only when the host consumed one of the limited health items could the phantom be healed. This was quickly lost in sequels, however, allowing both to heal independently. (There were other ways for the phantom to heal, such as spells, but the core healing dynamic was a flask that refilled at bonfires, and it was deactivated in multiplayer for the phantom.)
4. The player and phantom could not leave a prescribed zone within which they were summoned until the boss was defeated.
5. Once the boss was defeated, the player could not summon anyone in that zone. The player could, however, be summoned themselves as many times as necessary by as many different people as wanted them. As soon as the boss was dead, the phantom would return to their world.

To give you a scenario to demonstrate this, I was playing with a friend back in the day. We were on Xbox, so we called each other on the phone and set it for speaker. I would place my sign around a corner where there was no reason for other players to wander, in a location called the Undead Parish. My friend would go there and wait until the sign appeared, sometimes use a bonfire (rest location) which would reset the area, repopulating any dead non-boss enemies, and potentially moving him to the same server as me. When my sign finally appeared, I was summoned, but I could not leave the Undead Parish, nor could he. If we were successful, we would have fought our way through the building to the boss battle on the roof, vanquished them, and then I would immediately disappear and return to my own world with the rewards of the battle.

If we chose to play through the game together, I would then have to summon him so that the boss that was still on that roof in my world could be fought. Then we would together move on to the next area, lay our summon signs, and continue.

This obtuse system, which has had variations over the course of the series, was a deliberate design decision. Basically everything from point 1 to point 5 was intended to steer people away from just playing the game with their friends, and towards working with complete strangers with whom communication was limited.

The series lead designer Hidetaka Miyazaki told this anecdote about why he wanted the game to play like this:

"The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill... That's it! That's how everyone can get home! Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely."

"But I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I'd have just got stuck again if I'd stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd met in another place we'd become friends, or maybe we'd just fight..."

"You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. Simply because it's fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer... like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much."

To push this “mutual assistance between tran...

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Johnny's & Associates

Johnny's & Associates is a Japanese talent management agency established in 1962 by Japanese-American Johnny Kitagawa. What started as organizing people he met dancing at parks turned into a media juggernaut managing male idol groups in high demand during Japan's economic peak. The now-popular dancing+singing+acting formula originated here, starting with boybands. Groups include SMAP, TOKIO, Arashi, Snow Man, Kis-my-ft2, KAT-TUN, King & Prince, SixTones, really the whole gamut of male faces on TV. Back then popular idols had incomes in the hundreds and thousands of dollars per month, working so rigorously that many former Onyanko Club members have said they have no recollection of that time due to the sleep deprivation. After the success of the show Kinpachi-sensei Johnny's ballooned in influence within broadcasting, an unusual position for a talent management company. Former TV producers commented that the selection of certain idols and actors was a make-or-break factor in viewership, and that staying on Johnny's "good side" was a constant industry preoccupation.

Unfortunately Kitagawa was more of a Jimmy Savile figure with long-standing allegations of sexual abuse and harrassment bubbling beneath the mainstream media. In many entertainment circles it was an open secret, dirty laundry successfully hidden for decades due to the position Johnny's occupied. Allegations in memoirs by former idols sprung up as early as 1988, largely ignored by the mainstream press. In 2001 weekly newspaper/tabloid Shūkan Bunshun published allegations after which they were immediately hit with a libel suit by Johnny & Associates. While some claims the paper made were found to be libelous the sexual assault claims were found to be true and further appeals by the company were rejected in 2004. After the suit Shūkan Bunshun's parent media company was blacklisted access to any idols Johnny's managed.

It all came crashing down in 2023 well after Kitagawa's death in 2019 and an English BBC report on the allegations. A third-party investigation concluding in August determined that his sexual misconduct stretched across 40 years from the early 1970's to 2010. Nearly 500 victims were identified, many as part of Johnny's Jr. underaged at the time. Victims testified about how Kitagawa would climb into bed with them or walk into the dorm showers. The implicit message they were told at Johnny's being "bear through this and you'll be on TV." Others would be told "Your turn" and "He used to do a lot more back then," by older members, a sort of kids have it easy these days mentality. Many recalled how god-like Kitagawa would personally receive hundred of new years letters from all kinds of media, advertising, and food executives. With the bastard dead and the allegations firmly in the news advertisers started to pull out, cutting off valuable revenue streams from ad appearances. Kitagawa's niece and CEO Keiko Fujishima stepped down, the company was restructured, lots of public changes were advertised.

The press conference

On October 2th 2023 Johnny's staff including idol-turned CEO Noriyuki Higashiyama (who previously put his penis on a plate and told a junior member to "eat my sausage") and squeaky-clean Yoshihiko Inohara opened a press conference on the allegations and a renaming of the company to SMILE-UP. As this was following the outcry, mainstream coverage, and independent inquiry the expectation was that Johnny's would accept responsibility, pay for damages, and restructure to shed the old baggage that Kitagawa's legacy brought. 200 reporters attended including international correspondents from the New York Times to Reuters. A portion were also independent journalists including Masaki Kito, a reporter famous for his coverage of the Unification Church. Each media outlet was allocated only 1 question, with a former NHK news anchor turned moderator picking reporters by raised hands. An adversarial atmosphere fell over the 2-hour event with a portion of reporters complaining that they were being ignored. The moderator nervously responded "No, I am being fair. I am looking at everyone," and "it's not a farce" to angry reporters.

Former idol Yoshihiko Inohara argued with reporters who felt passed over saying "Let's show the children watching a conference of adults following rules," bizarrely eliciting both groans and applause within the reporters. Inohara was the public's darling, a figure more human-like than the other walking scandal machines in Johnny's. An embarrassing news article later praised him for his verbal spanking of reporters. Otherwise the conference ended with little media fanfare.

The blacklist

Then October 4th the public broadcaster NHK published footage showing Johnny's staff holding documents labelled "NG (No Good) reporters" during the conference. Accompanying the list was at least 6 portrait photos and their accompanying seat numbers. It suggested that Johnny's had created a media blacklist. Later reporting also suggested that ousted CEO Keiko Fujishima also attended, a firm contradiction with the company's efforts to sincerely make institutional changed they repeatedly promised.

When initially reported on the 4th Johnny's gave a simple response to the media: "We don't know." (sounding a bit more adversarial in Japanese more akin to "Not our business") The next day Johnny's issued a press release essentially offloading blame to its consulting partner responsible for managing the conference, American firm FTI partners. They stated a list was never produced nor requested by their staff, seemingly confirming the existence of the blacklist. Johnny's quoted Inohara, the same man who reprimanded unruly reporters as saying "What does this mean? It's no good if we don't call on everyone" after seeing the blacklist in a preliminary meeting. On October 5, 2023 FTI Consulting admitted the existence of the blacklist and staggeringly, a candidate list of "preferable" reporters. Their given reasons for such a list was to avoid retraumatizing former victims and filtering out reporters who "may spend too much time talking about themselves." Contradicting Johnny & Associates' claims FTI stated both parties confirmed the policy on how to proceed with the press conference.

This of course attracted further condemnation. Former Shūkan Bunshun journalist Ryūtarō Nakamura said "This is a total strike-out. With this it's obvious that their unscrupulous ways haven't changed. 'We didn't know' or 'a third-party was responsible' is not valid. "Preferable" journalist Chikako Komai and "NG" journalist Eito Suzuki appeared together on the news, Komai stating that the "preferable" label was much more problematic for her as a journalist.

Fan reactions

Before these admissions detractors and fundamentalist Johnny's fans clutched onto the first word of the NG list - "Name NG list," suggesting that it was merely reporters who opted not to disclose their names during the questions segment. Their argument that it was a misunderstanding, a malicious hitpiece on Johnny's, hitting someone when they're already down. The broadcaster that broke the story, the NHK, has long since been in the crosshairs of right-wingers much like the opposition to the BBC and now Jonny's fans were starting to join their ranks. A news article titled "Are young audiences getting estranged from Johnny's?" attracted angry comments responding that they were getting estranged with TV instead.

It's not Johnny's estrangement, it's boring shows needlessly bashing Johnny's. All those letters requesting the cancellation of their NHK subscriptions and they still don't get it?

NHK's audience studies? Young people's estrangement from Johnny's? How did they figure this out? I'm not young, but I've definitely started avoiding NHK. It's the end when Johnny's bashing even reaches public broadcasting.

It's not Johnny's estrangement, it's TV estrangement. The collective Johnny's lynching this time around has accelerated people away from their TV's. I don't even want to watch shows made by shit-awful people. I'll only watch shows that have my oshi(favorite idols/actors) If you can't even understand your own horribleness then you're over as a human being. Even the few news announcers I liked I rigorously hate now.

with some amusing responses

Is this something that someone who, despite being pretty up there in age is incapable of estranging themselves from Johnny's should be saying?

Of course criticism of In...

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What is Old School RuneScape?

Old School RuneScape is a retro MMORPG launched in 2013. Based on a 2007 backup of RuneScape, it's grown since its initial launch almost 11 years ago into one of the most successful MMOs on the market. Lauded for its immersive storylines, harsh yet rewarding progression system, and simplified feel compared to modern MMOs, it maintains a sizable following and reached an all-time record of over 125,000 concurrent players late last year.

Over the years, there has been endless drama in the community, to the point where we make calendars. I could probably write at least 50 short-to-medium length /r/HobbyDrama posts about all of our various controversies over the years. While the one I'll be talking about today is not the biggest drama in our game's history - that likely goes to 117HD - it was arguably the most disturbing one.

Politics and Rainbows

Historically, the Old School RuneScape playerbase has a had reputation for being politically right-wing. Trump supporters were/are very common throughout the game, and the themed world for the Wintertodt minigame is notorious for the toxic rhetoric in the public chat. For the most part, this didn't cause any notable issues with the devs, as a majority of the playerbase is American and Jagex (the owners of OSRS) are based in the UK. That all changed on 5 June 2017.

That day, OSRS developer Mod Wolf announced that a "small holiday event" would be coming to Old School RuneScape to commemorate Pride Month.

The response was...not favorable. Two of the most upvoted threads on r-2007scape from this period were "OSRS Should NOT have a pride event - from a mildy gay person" (which led to some amusement upon OP revealing their definition of "mildly gay") and "Yes, Gay Pride Is Political". Some people tried to emphasize that they were not being homophobic, but instead did not want "politics" in OSRS. Others objected to it not being polled - in Old School RuneScape, updates must be approved by 70% of the players (75% at the time) to be implemented in the game - but people quickly pointed out that holiday events are never polled because they're temporary content that gets removed after a few weeks.

The Protests

Things began to shift, however, as the event drew closer and protests began to pop up in-game. Autumn Elegy, a well-known and somewhat controversial player at the time, stated that he felt most of the objections to the protests were thinly-veiled homophobia, a sentiment echoed by many on the subreddit when his tweet was shared there.

The protests themselves were what made it clear to many people that anti-LGBT hate was at the core of most of the objections to the event. Many people wore desert robes at the protest (as an illusion to Muslim views on LGBT people), and people who wore the item rewarded for completing the event (a rainbow scarf) were targets of harassment.

And of course, all of this drama unfortunately put OSRS on the map. Many articles were written about this event in mainstream media:

Jagex, for the most part, ignored these protests. The Pride Event went on as planned, and while some people who were particularly nasty ended up getting muted or banned, there was little (if any) official response to how it was received. Many people pointed out that the response was highly disproportionate to the actual event, which was fairly simple, short, and took up very little space in the game world. But there would not be another Pride event for quite some time.

Things largely stayed this way until 2022, though in January 2020 former employee Mat K (one of the leads of OSRS until his departure) gave an interview with Shauny (another ex-employee) where he candidly discussed his thoughts on the 2017 Pride Event. He described the reaction to it as "horrific" and made no attempt to hide his disgust with the protesters' actions. He also noted that many of the people who protested were not regular OSRS users, stating that a thorough investigation afterwards concluded the majority of protestors were from outside hate groups. This interview also revealed that Wolf, the Pride Event developer, had his mental health severely damaged by the collective hate and fury that came from both the protestors and the anti-LGBT portions of the Internet as a whole. In 2022, Wolf stated "My only regret is that we didn't continue it yearly - caving into pressure, fear and hate".

Pride Returns

Then, in 2022, Pride returned. There was no announcement beforehand, and many players were surprised and expected a similar protest. Indeed, the news post announcing the event, when sorted by controversial, yields mostly positive comments.

What was different this time, however, was Jagex's response to the protestors, which could be accurately summarized as "go fuck yourselves."

r-2007scape was put on lockdown, and comments/posts protesting the event were swiftly removed. Players who protested the event with anti-LGBT rhetoric were banned, sometimes permanently. The area surrounding the event had its game mechanics altered to prevent common protest actions (starting fires, placing cannons down, etc). And the official in-game Pride march was heavily monitored to prevent disruption.

For the most part, things went well this time. There was no big media controversy, and the Pride march was well-attended by many enthusiastic players (including some, like myself, who are not LGBT but nonetheless appreciated an opportunity to rectify the past). There was an attempt to protest along the march route when players added objects like knives, ropes, and bones to the party chest in Falador, but that was about as bad as it got. And in a livestream discussing the event, Jagex made it clear that any protests only made them more determined to do it*.

As a way to acknowledge the events of the past, an NPC in the event was named in Mod Wolf's honor:

Another pride event happened last year, and it's now been added to the roster of annual holiday events. Some people still get annoyed, but Jagex has made it clear where they stand and what the consequences of disrupting an event are. All-in-all, that's a fairly good outcome in my opinion.

*I remember this livestream vividly, but for the life of me I couldn't find the transcript or the broadcast. If anyone can, I'll add it to the post.